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tate-owned port company Pelindo II, also known as the Indonesian Port Corporation (IPC), says that Japan’s Mitsui& Co., Ltd. has won the tender to operate Kalibaru’s first container terminal in North Jakarta, which is the country’s largest port, eliminating Maersk Line and MEC.

IPC corporate secretary Yan Budi Santoso said that an agreement between the two companies was signed in New York, the United States at the end of February.

“We are delighted to work with Mitsui as they have a great network and market in the world. We believe that Mitsui will help us accelerate the development and operation of [Kalibaru’s] the first terminal,” Yan told The Jakarta Post on Monday.

Apart from Mitsui Lines, he said the firm would bring in major shipping lines to the port such as NYK, Evergreen, Hanjin and APL, helping Indonesia grab the global market and strengthen its position as a maritime country.

“But, in the first stage, we plan to strengthen our Asian market,” he said.

He said that through the agreement, Mitsui was committed to begin operating its ships in Kalibaru Port in September 2014, with each of their ships having some 6,000 20-foot equivalent units (TEUs)
capacity.

The first terminal is projected to have a total capacity of 1.5 million TEUs.

In addition, he said that IPC planned to open a tender for the operation of the second and third container terminals in November this year so that development could begin in 2014.

“After that, we are going to open a bid for the operation of two fuel berths as we need to cope with the increasing traffic in [Tanjung] Priok,” Yan continued.

In the first phase, IPC will develop three container terminals with a total capacity of 4.5 million TEUs and two fuel berths to cope with the congested Tanjung Priok Port.

The firm expects the first phase of the project to be completed at the end of 2016.

Armed with a presidential decree issued in April last year, the company will develop Kalibaru Port with a planned total capacity of 13 million TEUs worth Rp 24 trillion (US$2.47 billion), constructed in three phases.

Tanjung Priok has been operating overcapacity with container traffic increasing between 10 and 20 percent annually.

Last year, total container traffic handled by Priok reached 6.2 million TEUs, up from 5.6 million in 2011. Meanwhile, the port was designed to accommodate only 5 million TEUs a year.

The figure was predicted to reach 7 million TEUs by the end of this year due to strong economic growth, Yan said.

The Kalibaru Port project initially began as part of Tanjung Priok’s expansion through the construction of new terminals that would have a capacity of 1.9 million TEUs.

However, as part of the Master Plan for the Acceleration and Expansion of Indonesian Economic Development (MP3EI), the government decided to make the terminals into a port and appointed the IPC as the sole project developer.