News that ICTSI had won the concession to operate Terminals 9 and 10 at the port of Naha in Okinawa, was reported by PS in the March issue (p.8). But this is about more than just another terminal contract. It’s part of a conscious effort by the Okinawa prefectural government to develop its industrial base and play its part on the international trade routes leading to and from China.<\/p>\n
“The island is essentially a tourist centre so it doesn’t have the processing industries to generate large cargo volumes, ” explains Edgardo Abesamis, executive vice-president at ICTSI. “But this project is precisely part of the effort to grow that. It’s a chicken and egg situation. The government of Okinawa wants processing industries to develop on the island and this is the reason why this investment in ports is being made to induce that trade and industrialisation. There is an industrial zone being developed at the back of the port. The government has thought it through and is willing to make these investments. We are really optimistic that the partnership between ourselves and the Naha port authority will bear fruit. The people there are very professional, very dedicated to see this project succeed.<\/p>\n
“There is a programme for structural improvement for Japanese ports and we may be the first foreign entity to be granted a concession, ” he adds. “Already there are a couple of other domestic ports that have been farmed out, one to a Japanese investor and one to a consortium involving foreign investors.”<\/p>\n
So what sequence of events led to the Naha concession, given that the Japanese often have their own way of doing things? “The process they used to invite potential terminal operators was standard, ” says Abesamis. “The lead person was an experienced former World Bank and ADB officer who had run projects of this nature before. They started with their own study, due diligence and internal procedures, then they went out and invited pre-qualified operators to tender. It was no different from what we have experienced in other parts of the world.”<\/p>\n
The Naha contract, initially a 10-year concession, starts in January 2006 and the port is currently building its second container terminal, Terminal 10. Naha is already equipped with two panamax gantry cranes on Terminal 9 and the provision of additional cranes will be ICTSI’s responsibility as volume grows. “Yard equipment is also essentially our responsibility, ” Abesamis continues, “but the situation in Japan is that stevedores are licensed by the government to work on a particular vessel.” ICTSI has already signed up six of the ports seven stevedores and hopes the seventh will join the consortium too.<\/p>\n
“These stevedores have their own equipment. What we will be doing is to manage and market the container terminal together with the port authority itself.”<\/p>\n
AN EYE ON CHINA AND BEYOND “When the project was first conceived, ” Abesamis explains, “the idea was to get even a small part of what goes through north eastern China and out to the US West Coast and Europe. Of course the capacity of Naha relative to those trades is very small. In terms of our planning we are looking at 400,000 TEUs as the upper limit until we carry out some revisions on the operational aspects which we won’t do until we really get the volumes coming. So we’re looking at those two flows initially. We think it’s possible if we can get northeastern China interested in serving their distant markets through Naha.”<\/p>\n
But relay cargo is only part of the plan. “We are also looking at intra-Asian trade. Taiwan has good volumes to Okinawa and so does China. There is also considerable domestic movement between Okinawa and mainland Japan.<\/p>\n
“Our foremost challenge is to take a share of the port services needed by the rapidly growing trade between mainland Asia and the rest of the world, ” he concludes. “We shall do this by emphasizing Okinawa’s strategic location to the world’s shipping lines and by providing them with a container port that is managed and operated as efficiently and competitively as any of the best ports that serve them in the world.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Nick Elliott reports on whats behind ICTSIs groundbreaking concession on the Japanese island of Okinawa.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":7011,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"sponsor":[],"class_list":["post-7010","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-concessions-investments"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7010","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7010"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7010\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7012,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7010\/revisions\/7012"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7011"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7010"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7010"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7010"},{"taxonomy":"sponsor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sponsor?post=7010"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}