
Smart move by BNSF
Demand for cement has been growing in leaps and bounds in Costa Rica over the past three years. The USA’s BNSF Logistics and Turkey’s Smart Logistics were recently in charge of transporting a substantial cement shipment from Izmir to Caldera.
Without cement, our era’s most important building material, there can be no concrete. High demand for the former has prevailed in Costa Rica of late. Between 2014 and 2016 the volume of cement imported into the country annually grew tenfold, from around 10,000 to more than 100,000 t.
A lot of the imported cement originates in China – but not all of it. Turkey is also a key cement producer and supplier for Costa Rican firms. Experts have estimated that Turkish companies took around 17 million t of capacities on stream between 2015 and 2017. Some of the resultant production is also destined for export.
Istanbul-based Smart Logistics and fellow WWPC member BNSF Logistics, based in the town of Flower Mound TX (USA), jointly transported a massive consignment of cement from Izmir (Turkey) to Caldera (Costa Rica) recently. Smart Logistics is the entity in charge of project logistics within Turkey’s Fevzi Gandur Group, which was originally founded in Lebanon in 1948.
The shipment’s volume came to around 9,200 cbm. It was shipped to the port on Costa Rica’s Pacific coast on the vessels Fortuna Bay and Fegulus.