Regional airport PPP projects delayed
The Department of Transportation and Communications (DOTC) moved the bid submission date for the auction of contracts for the Bacolod-Silay, Iloilo, Davao, Laguindingan and New Bohol air gateways under the administration’s Public Private Partnership (PPP) program.
The DOTC said in a bid bulletin that the submission date originally set on Feb. 29 this year would be moved 30 calendar days from the issuance of the final concession agreement.
There are five prequalified groups vying for the project. These are consortiums led by San Miguel Corp. and South Korea’s Incheon Airport, Metro Pacific Investments Corp. with a unit of Aéroports de Paris and TAV Havalimanlari Holdings A.S, Aboitiz Equity Ventures with VINCI Airports, Megawide Construction Corp. and India’s GMR Infrastructure, the Filinvest Group with Japan’s Sojitz and Jatco.
The DOTC said the operations and maintenance of the regional airports, selected partly for their tourism potential, would be bid out in two bundles.
The first bundle consists of the P20.26-billion Bacolod-Silay airport and the P30.4-billion Iloilo airport projects. The second bundle will include the P40.57-billion Davao airport, the P14.62-billion Laguindingan airport and the P2.34-billion New Bohol airport projects.
The winning concessionaires for each bundle will handle the operations and maintenance of the airports for 30 years and will undertake expansion of facilities as most of the airports are operating beyond their design capacity. These improvements were needed to enhance passenger safety and convenience as well as ensure more efficient airport operations, the DOTC said.
This is the second airport PPP deal after the P17.5-billion Mactan Cebu International Airport was rolled out and eventually awarded in 2014 to the Megawide-GMR consortium.
Apart from this project, the DOTC had said it was studying the possible O&M auction of Manila’s Ninoy Aquino International Airport, the country’s busiest air gateway. This comes amid the broader goal to replace Naia, which suffers from heavy congestion, with a new international gateway.
