(PMO) Seyed Ataollah Sadr announced that the country has started building 300 small multi-purpose ports on the rims of the Persian Gulf and the Sea of Oman.

"As a first step, we have selected 300 geographical locations for constructing ports along the (Persian Gulf and the Sea of Oman's) coasts and we are now through with locating the exact sites of 120 of them," Sadr stated.

He reiterated that 40 ports have, so far, been constructed each at a cost of $3 million.

Earlier in 2010, Sadr had noted that the capacity of container loading and unloading in Iran's ports is currently at about 4.4 million per year which will increase to 7 million by the end of 2015.

The current capacity of the country's ports is about 150 million tons per year, which will witness a significant rise by the end of the Fifth Development Plan (2010-2015), he added, according to Fars News.