Mediterranean Shipping Co.’s terminal arm Terminal Investment Limited has snapped up the half of the Itajai port’s Portonave container terminal it did not own for 1.3 billion reais ($389 million), a sign of the growing dominance of container lines in Brazilian terminal operations.
Portonave is the second-largest container terminal in Brazil, and local shippers have expressed concerns that the growing involvement of carrier sister companies in terminal operations will impact market choices. Maersk Line controls the other two options for containerized exports in the region, out of APM Terminals Itajai, while its recent acquisition of Hamburg Sud gave it a stake in the Porto Itapoa container terminal.
“The [Itajai] port users are sometimes left without options because the loading vessel of the shipowner will always operate in the terminal that belongs to them,” said Osvaldo Agripino, a lawyer for the Association of Brazilian Port Users (Usuport), which its to Brasilia.
“Neither Antaq [the Brazilian Waterborne Transport Agency] nor the Cade [Administrative Council for Economic Defense] have methods to identify any pricing anomalies,” he said.
However, Egidio Martorano, executive secretary for Transport and Logistics for the Federation of Industries in the State of Santa Catarina (FIESC), said he believed that those concerns can be managed through regulators and and FIESC itself, which can play a supervisory role in pricing and other issues.
Martorano was largely supportive of the deal, which he and others said signified the value of the Itajai port despite its struggles with flooding and maintaining adequate draft.
“The value of the sale reinforces the importance of the terminal, which is among the most important in Latin America and is one of the most efficient in Brazil,” he said. “The fact that the buyer already has equity interest brings tranquility, because the investment capacity and quality will remain. It’s quite positive.”
Robert Grantham, a director at Solve Shipping, a Navegantes-based consultancy, said that the deal means that the port has a healthy future despite the flooding, draft, and turning basin problems.
“The really good news it that we now have two terminals in the Itajai Port Complex controlled by the two largest carriers in the world. This says a lot about the importance of the Santa Catarina region and it’s a firm vote of confidence in the port’s future,” he said.
“It is also an incentive to carry out the construction of the new turning basin and get on with the job of restoring the port’s draft via more dredging.”
Grantham also shed light on the issues behind the sale.
“One of the main reasons behind the sale is that the Triunfo Group [owner of the stake MSC purchased] is highly indebted in the short term and they need cash desperately, so one of their most valuable and most liquid assets is their stake in Portonave,” said Grantham. “The logical buyer was always going to be TIL.”
Traffic at Portonave surged 34 percent year-over-year in 2016 to 910,870 TEU as it gained calls from its rival across the Itajai Acu River, APMT Itajai.
Located in the chicken-producing southern state of Santa Catarina, Portonave handled around 110,000 TEU of reefer cargo last year (predominantly chicken) making it one of the biggest exporters of white meat in the world, with much of it from the giant conglomerates BR Food and JBS.
Portonave covers 400,000 square meters (4.3 million square feet), and utilizes three berths on a 900 meter (2,953 feet) linear quay, six ship-to-shore gantry cranes, 18 rubber-tire gantry cranes, a storage capacity of 30,000 TEU, and 2,100 reefer plugs. It also includes Iceport, which is a 50,000-square-meter cold storage terminal, one of the biggest in the Itajai port, which hosts one of the largest selections cold storage warehousing in the world, especially geared toward chicken shipments.
