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hang Jian Nanjing Waterway Engineering, a Chinese company, has offered an investment worth US$1.02 billion to the East Java provincial administration to develop the Tanjung Perak international seaport in Surabaya and the Tanjung Tembaga port in Probolinggo.

Head of the Provincial Investment Agency, Warno Harisasono, said a letter of intent (LoI) had been signed in July this year between the company and the administration for such a purpose.

“We are currently exploring further the investor and the central government according to prevailing laws,” Warno said recently, adding that another investor from Belgium had also offered the same investment.

Separately, the provincial administration’s assistant overseeing the economy, Hadi Prasetyo, said East Java had been accelerating development of four ports in the province.

Two of the ports in question are Socah port in Bangkalan, Madura, and Teluk Lamong port. Each has the loading and unloading capacity of 300,000 twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs), with investments of Rp 2.8 trillion and Rp 3.5 trillion
respectively.

“This is part of the development of Tanjung Perak port, which has been overloaded since 2000,” he said.

Other ports to develop are Tanjung Tembaga in Probolinggo and Tanjung Wangi in Banyuwangi, which are part of the province’s southern region expansion. These two ports will be integrated with the development of the East Java southern highway.

Head of port operator PT Pelabuhan Indonesia III’s public relation division, Edi Priyanto, said that the ship visit rate to Tanjung Perak had been steadily increasing in line with the increasing provincial demand for commodities.

From January to March 2011, for example, the port received over 53 million gross tons (GT) in ship visits, 108 percent of the target, Edi said.

“The government must expand Tanjung Perak because, with its annual capacity topping out at 30 million GT, customers complain that loading and unloading, which should only take one or two days, needs up to five days instead,” Edi said.

Other problems, according to Edi, include the conditions of the Surabaya west shipping lane (APBS). The APBS is 300 meters wide and 8–9 meters deep. However, only 100 meters of the width is usable, which means only ships of 4,000 gross weight ton (GWT) can enter the port.

Indonesia has 111 commercial seaports and 614 non-commercial ports.