Deal certainty
APM Terminals is to take on Gothenburg's SCT
There have been a few instances over the past year where the transition from Preferred Bidder to being award a terminal concession has been unusually swift.
So much so that it raises the uncomfortable question of whether the bidding processes were in fact as fair and transparent as they purported to be.
It’s reasonable to say that port authorities on issuing a tender will hope certain operators throw their hat into the ring and in the same vein, it’s not unreasonable to suggest that on submission they may have favourites before reading any of the bid documents.
But all interested parties should be given a fair crack of the whip, regardless of preconceived ideas, otherwise there’s little point in going through the motions of a tender process.
Preparing documentation for a concession bid is no small task, and takes time and resources not all operating companies have to spare.
Smaller port operators looking to branch out don’t have dedicated tender departments, and can only yearn for the capacity that the APMTs and DP Worlds of the industry have at their disposal.
So in those instances where the speed of award has been suspiciously fast, it is not unreasonable to speculate that the ‘winner’ was always meant to be and that the other bidders were effectively just there to elevate the price.
As a base line, these things do invariably always boil down to money; and it’s a happy co-incidence if the winning bid is the highest and submitted by the favourite bidder. But in the dash to anoint the winner there’s a chance that a port authority might overlook the qualitative aspects of the other bids.
More peripheral factors like job creation, relationships outside the gate, and marketing strategies all play a part in the wider picture and should be viewed on their own worth.
Making only a cursory glance at submissions from ‘non-preferred’ bidders also means that port authorities may miss a trick in cherry picking keen ideas from other submissions that can be shoe-horned into the winning bidder’s contract. Of course, we could never advocate such a practice, but we hear that it happens.
If a port authority offering a concession is truly looking for the best fit for its port, it must put pre-conceptions out of mind and view each bid submission on its own merits – it’s the only way
to guarantee innovation and outside-the-box thinking, which is surely the point of a tender
process in the first place.
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