Interview of the week – Samer & Co. Shipping – Croatia

We opened the company in 2016 and today we are one of top freight forwarders in Croatia. Our main competences lie in project business, air, sea and road, our primary product being conventional rail. For project logistics, Samer Zagreb is our main company providing project services to the Samer International group.  We work in close cooperation with the project & chartering department in our HQ office in Trieste and provide services, not only for the Croatian market, but also for our own offices in Slovenia, Slovakia, Hungary, Serbia, and Bosnia.  So, we have vast project knowledge as a group and we can support our partners in their needs within the region as well.

Other than Samer Croatia, under Samer International SRL we have offices in Koper, Ljubljana, Bratislava, Budapest, Novi Sad, Belgrade, Sarajevo, and Istanbul. Recently, we opened our branch in Odessa/UA in order to mainly support ongoing, and also future projects, in the country.

In the countries we operate, we also have a separate company that deals with loading/ lashing surveys, cargo controls for insurance purposes as Lloyd's of London insurance brokers. So, we can support that part of business as well.

Recently, we handled the move of 550 cars from Koper to Israel utilizing a chartering vessel as well. We also handled oversize cargo of military equipment from the Baltics to Croatia and Serbia. Now we are in the process of moving 4 transformers of approximate dimensions 12 m x 5m x 5 m, each weighing 450 tons to UA over Constanta starting with a road survey.  Moreover, we are preparing the move of a large number of oversized shipments from Rijeka to Belgrade for our Chinese agent for building a sports stadium.

We serve many industries, but one of our strong points I can mention is air exports to US, where we are a market leader with very strong infrastructure in the country, providing on time delivery throughout the US thanks to our great agents. Additionally, we are focused on projects of handling equipment and machinery, especially now, with all the new investments taking place in our region.

We aim to participate in projects by supporting our clients from the very beginning of building their factory or infrastructure, which means that we must support them way before moving the first piece of cargo.  That involves investigating the best optimal routes, conducting road surveys, importing cargoes for the client etc. Our strong area of expertise is chartering vessels and handling conventional train service from/to port or terminal to terminal across Europe which is a service that not many freight forwarders provide in our region.

Due to Croatia’s specific shape, it is a challenge to handle deliveries to the lower part of Dalmatia from the port of Rijeka, which entails high costs, especially in case the project involves low cargo quantity and we cannot charter a vessel to Zadar, Split or Ploce.

Another problem we face is the very limited number of truckers that can support oversize cargo, mainly higher weights. The reason is that we have a significantly smaller number of foreign investments than in e.g. Serbia, so less projects meaning less suppliers. For example, last year we handled a big project of moving an entire beer factory to several overseas destinations where we had to out-source a company to pack one part of cargo in wooden boxes and another to pack in thermofoil. It proved to be quite challenging to find companies in Croatia to guarantee the handling in the required time so eventually we used an Austrian one for that service.

Every day is different, and no one can say he knows what to expect the next day. After more than 20 years in this industry, I’m still surprised, sometimes negatively but more often positively. Most importantly though, is that I have the privilege to work with great professionals and great people in my company from who I constantly learn and that’s most important part for me.