The Ukrainian Seaports Authority (USPA) considers it necessary to reduce the number of its branches from 13 to 5-8 in order to optimize its operations.
This was announced by the USPA’s head Raivis Veckagans, the Interfax Ukraine news agency reports.
"We believe that we can implement management decisions and reduce costs by pooling management resources and not having a branch in every seaport. Instead, we should restructure the system. For example, we could have one branch in the Danube ports that would manage several ports. We have 13 port branches, the Delta Pilot division, and the Dredging Fleet division. We see the possibility of optimizing the management structure of the USPA by retaining 5-8 port branches instead of 13," said Veckagans.
The USPA expressed its intention to reduce the number of its branches from 13 to 6 and organize them on a regional basis in spring 2016. The USPA announced at the time that it planned to bring the Belgorod-Dniester port under the control of its Illichivsk branch in addition to the Chornomorsk port and create a Danube branch to oversee the ports of Reni, Ust-Dunaisk, and Izmail, create a Mykolaiv branch to manage the ports located in Mykolaiv, and create an Azov branch to verse the Mariupol port. It planned to retain its branches in the ports of Odesa and Yuzhny.
