SCI to build country’s largest container terminals

Shipping Corporation of India Ltd, India’s shipping major, will build two of the country’s largest container terminals - one each at Navi Mumbai and Ennore ports.

The Navi Mumbai port is managed by the Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust (JNPT). “We are planning to set up a fourth terminal in JNPT and a container terminal at Ennore, each having a capacity of four million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU). These will be the largest terminals in the country, said S. Hajara, chairman and managing director of SCI on the sidelines of logistics colloquium organized by Confederation of Indian Industries (CII). At present, three terminals each of both JNPT and Ennore together have capacity of four million TEUs. SCI plans to set up the terminals through a joint venture consortium with partners such as Mediterranean Shipping Company, Concor, and CWC. SCI would have a participatory stake in this joint venture. “We are actively looking at greater participation in the feeder routes both to west and to east,” he said. “We are also very actively looking at the possibility of getting involved in inland container depots and container freight stations (ICD/CFS),” Hajara added. SCI expects that all orders would be delivered by 2014 which would help it to double its capacity from around 5 million deadweight tonnes (DWT) at present to 10 million DWT in 2014. He said SCI and Steel Authority of India Limited (SAIL) have signed a memorandum of understanding for floating a joint-venture project which would allow SAIL to run its own fleet of vessels for importing coking coal. It would be a public-private-partnership project, where both SCI and SAIL would have 25 percent stake each and the rest would be with the private partners.
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