Philippine Daily Inquirer, 15 December 2013

By Miguel R. Camus

 

Major conglomerates that participated in last week’s P17.5-billion Mactan Cebu International Airport concession auction are looking forward to other airport Public Private Partnership (PPP) deals that will likely be offered by the transportation department next year.

This follows the strong interest in the Mactan Cebu International Airport, which drew bids from seven of the country’s biggest conglomerates and their respective international foreign airport-operator partners.

Gokongwei-led JG Summit Holdings Inc. and Metro Pacific Investments Corp., as well as the Mactan Cebu Airport’s likely winner, Megawide Construction Corp. and India’s GMR Infrastructure, said they would retain their respective consortiums for upcoming airport PPPs.

San Miguel Corp., which teamed up with South Korea’s Incheon for the Cebu airport deal, was also keen on participating in other airport projects that will be auctioned off, president Ramon Ang said earlier.

The transportation department and PPP Center are considering holding in early January next year an investors’ conference for other airport deals in the pipeline, PPP Center executive director Cosette Canilao said.

The deals would likely cover operations contracts for air gateways in Iloilo, Bacolod, Davao, Puerto Princesa (Palawan), Bohol and Laguindingan (Misamis Oriental). These would be bundled together to make them more attractive to larger international airport operators, Canilao said.

Bach Johann Sebastian, chief strategist at JG Summit, said the company would retain its partnership with Metro Pacific, led by businessman Manuel V. Pangilinan. Their consortium, which partnered with France’s Aeroports de Lyon, gave the fourth-highest bid for the Cebu airport PPP at P11.23 billion.

“We are interested in other airport PPP projects,” Sebastian said in an interview last week. “It’s attractive because Davao, Bacolod and Iloilo combined are as big as [Mactan Cebu International Airport].”

Oliver Tan, chief financial officer of Megawide, said the company’s partnership with GMR would  remain for other airport projects. GMR-Megawide is likely to bag the Cebu airport deal with an offer of P14.4 billion, the highest of the seven offers submitted during the bidding.

Taken together, airports in Davao, Bacolod and Iloilo handled about 5.5 million passengers in 2011, government statistics showed. Mactan Cebu International Airport, the Philippines’s second-busiest airport, handled about 6.7 million passengers last year.

Canilao said the market-sounding event would help the government gain inputs on the best structure for upcoming airport PPPs.

“We want to see what their preferences will be, the size of the bundling,” Canilao said.