Sri Lanka, China consortium sole bidder for Colombo container terminal

A consortium made up of Sri Lankan conglomerate Aitken Spence and China Merchant Holdings are the sole bidders to design and build a new container terminal in Colombo port, officials said. "We are the only bidder, there is no competition, " a spokesperson for Aitken Spence said soon after bids closed Wednesday.
"Our technical qualifications will have to now be checked, which will take a few weeks."

A Sri Lanka Ports Authority official said he believed there was only one bid for the project to build the first new terminal in a new port being built next to Colombo because of the prevailing credit crunch.
"It’s a good project but the prevailing financial crisis would have made it difficult for most companies to raise funds. Banks are very reluctant to fund projects at this stage."

He said the evaluation of the technical bid would take a couple of weeks after which the authorities will open the financial bid.

The Aitken Spence official said China Merchant Holdings has a 50 million TEU (Twenty-foot Equivalent Unit) annual container capacity in ports it manages in China and Hong Kong.
"China Merchant Holdings is one of the largest port operators in the region," the Aitken Spence official said.
"After the financial bids are opened they will have to announce us as the preferred bidder."

The government aborted an earlier bidding round in which Aitken Spence and several others put in bids in 2008.

The project to build a new terminal in Colombo was originally thought to have attracted the interest of top port operators and shipping lines as they were among those who collected the bid documents.

These included Maersk, the world's biggest shipping line, APL, another global shipping line, Hutchison Port Holdings, a big global port terminal operator based in Hong Kong, and Gulftainer, a port operator based in Sharjah in the UAE.

 

Source: Port News