“In about 7 or 10 days we should have the prices and we will be able to compare.” In a brief and decisive address, the Executive Director of the National Agency for Ports and Navigation, Iñaki Arreseygor, anticipated at the closing of the Ports Congress organized by the Chamber of Private Commercial Ports that the opening of the most important envelope of the trunk waterway tender, containing the economic proposals, is increasingly close.
Regarding “the most consensual tender documents that could ever be achieved,” the official described the unprecedented nature due to the level of participation in working groups with users, provinces, environmentalists, and the Coast Guard, and projected that the tender will define “the next 25 years of river logistics and logistics in a large part of Argentina.”
Again, he highlighted the international technical validation: “I believe the audit conducted by the United Nations was very important. It reassured us as signatories, the users as ultimately the payers of this future cost, and society as a whole.”
Two giants in competition
Reviewing the status of the evaluations, Arreseygor specified that over the last two months Envelope 1 was analyzed, a stage in which a Brazilian company was disqualified for not presenting the corresponding guarantees, so the process continued with the other “top global companies,” which met the desired concessionaire profile and whose operational capacity had been certified by the United Nations.
In this context, the head of ANPYN announced the next administrative milestone: “Tomorrow we will be signing the pre-selection minutes for the move to Envelope 3, in which the two companies (Jan De Nul and DEME) will also possibly be moving forward. So in about 7 or 10 days we should have the prices and we will be able to compare.”
For Arreseygor, reaching this stage with open prices represents a historic milestone and a display of corporate “fair play.” “We will have the two best competing with open prices, and I believe that is a success for the sector,” he emphasized.
Business risk and cost reduction
The underlying objective of this concession changeover, strongly driven by both the private sector and the provinces and neighboring countries, is to consolidate a purely corporate management model.
In the words of the ANPYN director, the priority of all actors was to ensure that the system “moves once and for all to the private sector, at business risk, without State subsidies.”
Under this scheme of free competition and operational efficiency, the Government projects a direct and immediate relief for users of the Trunk Waterway.
Arreseygor stated it with a forceful estimate of the impact of the economic bidding: the goal is for the quotations to hit the floor of the tariff band so “that in a couple of months we have a reduction of at least 15% of what is currently paid in tolls.”
