Off the shelf
Santos: APMT has a major investment underway in Brazil
A fall in construction prices in certain parts of the world could help to drive new port investment, says Jonathan Tyler, business group director, maritime, at Royal Haskoning.
He says that in the container sector, after a decrease in new projects during most of 2010, there has been a general pick-up since December. “Projects partly put back on the shelf have at least been taken back off and are being looked at again.”
He names Brazil and Australia as key investment areas, where port investments are likely to be very much natural resources based. Australia is seeing a lot of M&A activity in the mining sector and also an increase in activity related to liquefied natural gas, he says, and it will be interesting to see how this translates into port business.
Meanwhile, he also looks to India as a major growth area. “Despite the downturn, we have continued to grow our business in India,” he says.
Within South East Asia, he pinpoints Indonesia as a country to watch. “Traditionally Indonesia has been a difficult country for doing business, with a lack of transparency. But there does seem to have been a positive change; clients are looking to particular natural resources, with increasing demand for export facilities, but there could also be increasing demand on the container side of things.”
There also continues to be a good flow of opportunities in the Middle East, particularly in Oman and Saudi Arabia, he says. And in West Africa, which has seen its fair share of ups and downs in terms of exploiting natural resources, there appears to be a pick-up on projects shelved during the downturn, including minerals and metals, oil exploration and container terminals.
After a recovery in volumes in 2010, the ‘new normal’ is a world moving at two different speeds, says Peder Sondergaard, head of new terminals at APM Terminals.
“We have the mature economies and the emerging markets, and they are running at two different paces; container volumes in emerging markets will be growing at two to three times that of the mature markets,” he says. He says that rapid growth may well lead to bottlenecks in some emerging markets, either because they need to catch up on infrastructure or simply because of very high growth.
“That is where the port opportunities are. There is a need in certain countries and markets around the world for upgrading infrastructure.”
APMT’s focus is "emerging markets where we believe we can add value", he says.
Already the largest terminal operator in the West African region, APM Terminals is due to go live with its new facilities at the Liberian port of Monrovia in February. It has a major investment project underway in Brazil, where last year it acquired a 50% share in the new 2.2m teu Brasil Terminal Portuario container facility being built in Santos.
Work is also nearing completion at APMT’s new Cai Mep International Terminal in Vietnam, a facility that will provide the first deepwater container terminal in the country.
APMT has also submitted a bid to build a new port at Limon, on the Atlantic coast of Costa Rica. “This is for a port to serve a very large export market for bananas and pineapples – Costa Rica is globally the largest exporter of pineapples,” says Mr Sondergaard. “It is a very big project and we await a government decision on that.”
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