Ports and airports rarely make the headlines, but in 2026 they deserve a closer look. Croatian ports had their busiest first half in more than a decade, Rijeka handled more containers than ever before, and the airports kept growing. Here’s what the numbers are telling us, with the usual disclaimer that statistics, like ferry timetables, should be read carefully.
Firstly, looking at the broad picture, Croatian seaports handled 12.39m tonnes of cargo in the first half of 2026, up 20.8% YoY. Containers did the heavy lifting: Rijeka alone handled 404.6k TEU (3.84m tonnes of goods), up 70.4% YoY, which represents roughly 95% of the containers moving through Croatia. The official DZS first release for Q2 makes the same point: containerised goods were up 82.9% YoY in the second quarter alone and now make up 35% of all tonnage handled in Croatian ports. Sea passengers, at 13.12m, were flat to the decimal point (+0.04%). Airports carried 10.25m passengers in January to August, up 2.3% YoY. So: freight is sprinting, sea passengers are stable, and airports are walking at a comfortable pace, all at record levels.
Let’s start with Rijeka, because a 70% jump in half a year is not something you see often in port statistics, which usually move at the speed of a tugboat. The explanation has a name: Rijeka Gateway, the new container terminal on the Zagreb pier, which started commercial operations in September 2025. Rijeka now has two container terminals competing for calls, and the shipping lines have noticed. To put the jump in context, Rijeka averaged roughly 35k TEU a month in 2024. In May 2026 it handled 82.8k TEU. The full year 2025 was already a record at 512.9k TEU (4.69m tonnes, +22.6% YoY), and the first half of 2026 alone is about 79% of that number. Between 2015 and 2025 the port grew at a 12.9% CAGR, which was already respectable. 2026 is a different gear.
Rijeka container throughput, TEU (thousands)
Source: DZS, InterCapital Research
Rijeka Gateway deserves a few lines on its own, because it is the biggest private port investment Croatia has seen in a very long time. It’s a joint venture of APM Terminals (part of the Maersk group, 51%) and the Croatian ENNA Logic (49%), which signed a 50-year concession for the terminal in November 2021. Phase one has a 400m quay and capacity of about 650k TEU a year (TEU, or twenty-foot equivalent unit, is how the industry counts boxes: a 20-foot container is one TEU, a 40-foot one is two). Phase two takes it above 1m TEU. It’s worth being precise about who paid for it. The private partners are investing around EUR 380m, a bit over EUR 200m in phase one and about EUR 180m in phase two, while the state put in around EUR 187m, mostly through a World Bank loan, plus EU co-financing for the quay, roads and rail links. For phase one that’s roughly a 50/50 public-private project, and across both phases the total comes to around EUR 600m. Maersk then moved its AE12 Far East service (with Hapag-Lloyd) from Trieste to Rijeka. AE12 is a regular container line, run with Hapag-Lloyd, that links the Adriatic with Port Said in Egypt, where cargo connects to the big ships sailing to and from Asia. The biggest shipping group in the world brought its own ships to its own terminal, which, as business plans go, is a pretty reliable one.
The quality holds up too. Rijeka’s empty container share in Q2 was 20.6%, slightly below last year (21%), and in tonnes, which ignore empty boxes, growth was even stronger at +73.8%. Outbound boxes rose 84% YoY, inbound 58%. According to Port Authority data reported by Novi list, Rijeka Gateway handled about 206k containers in H1, more than half of the port’s total, while the older Jadranska vrata terminal at Brajdica was down around 24% YoY. In other words, the new terminal is both growing the pie and taking a slice of the old one.
Across the North Adriatic, Koper remains the undisputed number one with 1.25m TEU in 2025 (+11.8% YoY). Trieste fell to 579k TEU (-24% YoY), and losing AE12 at the end of the year didn’t help. Venice was flat at 564k. In Q1 2026 Rijeka handled 175k TEU, ahead of both Trieste (169k) and Venice (107k) in the same quarter for the first time, and Q2 brought 229k TEU. In tonnes Rijeka was still a whisker behind Trieste in Q1, since its boxes are lighter, but on a trailing four-quarter basis to Q1 2026 it’s already at 46% of Koper’s TEU volume, a ratio that would have sounded like a typo five years ago.
North Adriatic container ports, TEU per quarter (thousands)
Source: Eurostat, InterCapital Research. Each country reports on its own calendar; Q2 2026 available for Rijeka only.
This isn’t a zero-sum game. Koper kept growing too, a sign that the whole North Adriatic is gaining share as Far East services get reshuffled. In H1 2026 it handled 656k TEU (+5% YoY, 6% above plan), while revenue rose to EUR 206.1m (+10%), EBITDA to EUR 73.3m (+7%, 30% above plan) and net profit to EUR 48.1m (+11%). H1 EBIT already covers about 79% of the full-year plan, so the conservative budget is looking very conservative indeed. The soft spots were cars (-9%) and dry bulk, held back by rail capacity. Koper is also investing heavily: capex hit EUR 91.6m in H1 (+70%), led by the roughly EUR 153m Pier I extension, due by end-2027, which should lift container capacity to about 1.8m TEU. Both neighbours are building bigger garages and hoping Central European demand parks on their side of the border.
The market noticed. LKPG trades at EUR 116, up 61% YTD and 78.5% over a year, with a EUR 2.30 dividend paid in August. For a port operator famous for being steady rather than exciting, that’s quite a rerating, and Koper shareholders have had a year in which the most stressful decision was what to do with the dividend.
Back home, the headline +20.8% in cargo needs a footnote. Strip out Rijeka and Omišalj and the rest of the ports moved about 4.24m tonnes, down roughly 6% YoY. Omišalj, JANAF’s crude terminal, had a strong half with 4.03m tonnes (+22.9%), as more of the region’s crude arrives by sea. Elsewhere it was greyer: Ploče -2.5%, Bakar -7.7%, Split -3.0%, Raša -18.1%, and coal collapsed from 581k to 114k tonnes. Dry bulk overall fell 31.5%.
Cargo by port, H1 2025 vs H1 2026 (million tonnes)
Source: DZS, InterCapital Research
Passengers are calmer. Seaports handled 13.12m in H1, exactly in line with last year. One statistical quirk: DZS counts every ferry passenger twice, once when they leave Split and again when they arrive in Supetar. Anyone who has queued for the Split ferry in July would swear the real crowd is even bigger than that. Split led with 2.01m (+1.0%), ahead of Zadar (1.13m) and Dubrovnik (1.09m, -2.7%). The ferry network is mature: the islands aren’t getting bigger, and neither is the season. Cruise is where the growth is, with 597k passengers in H1 (+16.6% YoY), 42% of them in Dubrovnik. 2025 ended at 1.62m, already 7% above 2019, so another record looks likely, which Dubrovnik will probably see as a mixed blessing.
Cruise passengers in Croatian ports, January to June (thousands)
Source: DZS, InterCapital Research.
Up in the air, Croatian airports carried 10.25m passengers in January to August according to DZS, up 2.3% YoY, with the six big airports about 26% above 2019, after a record 2025. Still up, but flatter. Zagreb is the biggest airport this year at 3.15m (+1.8%, 139% of 2019) and the only one that isn’t a summer business. Split slipped to 2.81m (-1.1%), Dubrovnik grew to 2.33m (+4.2%), and Zadar keeps proving low-cost carriers can rewrite a map at 230% of 2019. Pula is still at only 73% of 2019, while Rijeka (Krk) grew fastest at +17.6%, from a small base.
Airport passengers, January to August (thousands)
Source: Eurostat, InterCapital Research.
In June to August, Split and Dubrovnik ran at 109% of 2019. With beaches, hotels and the Split ferry all full in August, growth has to come from June, September and October, and from the bill rather than the headcount. For Arena, Valamar and Maistra, 2026 is about pricing, costs and a longer season, not more guests. A more demanding game, but not a bad one.
So what does it all mean for investors? The biggest story of 2026 isn’t on the beach, it’s in the cranes. The North Adriatic is turning into a serious gateway to Central Europe, and the money going in says the people who know the business agree. Koper is the clearest listed winner, with record volumes, earnings above plan and a share price that has finally priced some of it in. Rijeka is the year’s breakout: if the Q2 pace holds, 2026 could land well above 800k TEU (our rough inference, not a forecast). Omišalj and JANAF are quietly cashing in on energy security, and tourism is posting near-record numbers while shifting from volume to value.
The risks are real, though. Rail is the bottleneck both ports mention whenever someone hands them a microphone, with Rijeka waiting on the lowland railway to Zagreb and Koper on its second track to Divača. And tourism is near capacity in peak months, so a weak season would show up fast. Still, if we had to sum up 2026 in one sentence: the Adriatic is no longer just where Europe goes on holiday, it’s increasingly where Europe’s goods come ashore. For a region long described as “too small and too far”, that’s a pretty good place to be.