Maersk-Concor may bag JNPT project

The Maersk-Concor consortium has bagged the contract of converting a bulk terminal at the Jawahar Lal Nehru Port to a container terminal.

The financial bid submitted by the consortium says it will share 36 per cent of the revenue generated from the project with the government. This is just ahead of United Liners-Hamburg Port's bid of 31.8 per cent.

Other parties in the fray for the Rs 1,000 crore project were PSA-Wadia, with a bid of 26.2 per cent, and Evergreen-Marubeni, which bid 18 per cent.

The port expects to sign the license agreement prepared by Tata Consulting Engineers by the end of this month.

Concor, a subsidiary of Indian Railway, will be venturing into terminal operation business for the first time. It monopolises inland transportation of cargo in India. Maersk, on the other hand, operates around 40 terminals around the world.

This will be the third container terminal at JNPT. The other two are operated by the government and P&O (at Nhava Sheva), respectively.

A year-long bidding process, which had started with the floating of global tenders in October 2002, has finally come to an end. The bidding process had its own share of problems with a few provisions in the concession agreement being changed.

While the original bidding document was in favour of the revenue-sharing model, the government finally settled for a model that combined revenue sharing with minimum-guaranteed-throughput.

According to the final norms, the operator will have to achieve a throughput of around 1.3 million tonnes in the seventh year of its operation.

Even the technical evaluation stage was mired in controversy with the last minute withdrawal of CDC of UK and Nikhil Gandhi's Sea King Infrastructure from their consortiums lead by United Liners and CMA-CGM, respectively. This created fears about the disqualification of the parties.

The port trust, however, on January 20 had to give the bidders a month's time to redraft their technical bid document to rectify the deficiencies.

In the technical evaluation results, declared in the beginning of March, CMA-CGM's bid was disqualified leaving just four parties in the fray.

Terminal project

• The financial bid submitted by Maersk-Concor says it will share 36 per cent of the revenue generated from the project with the government
• Others in the fray were United Liners-Hamburg Port, which bid 31.8 per cent, PSA-Wadia, with a bid of 26.2 per cent, and Evergreen-Marubeni, at 18 per cent
• The port expects to sign the license agreement prepared by Tata Consulting Engineers by the end of this month