Abstract
In late 2008, the Guaymas expansion project was announced by Mexico' s
Secretariat of Communications
and Transport. The tendering process will be
overseen by the Administración Portuaria Integral de
Guaymas. The
tender is for construction and operation of a container terminal at the port.
The submission
date for bids will be March 6 2009 and the project will be
awarded on March 20. The new terminal is to
be completed in 2010, and will
be capable of handling 100,000 containers, with the possibility of future
expansion. A lot of activity is currently underway in Mexico' s Pacific coast
port sector. In the preceding
months, two other major port projects were
announced. In August, Mexican President Felipe Calderón
opened the
bidding for the planned US$4bn mega port at Punta Colonet. In September, the
Port of
Manzanillo announced plans to increase its operational capacity
after SSA México, a unit of the USbased
container ports company
Stevedoring Services of America, announced a plan to invest US$105mn
to
add new gantry cranes. These investments in Mexico' s port sector will aid the
country' s import and
export capabilities, as Mexico relies on its maritime
sector to ship a significant proportion of total freight
carried. We
believe that the other main reason for Mexico' s Pacific coast port expansion
is a bid to
capture some of the US' Asian imports, particularly from
China. In recent years US west coast ports have
had congestion problems,
leading to the idea that Mexican ports could serve as a transit hub to ease
the
pressure on US ports. Chinese goods would be shipped to Mexico and
then loaded onto rail or road for
their journey to the US. BMI points out
that the Port of Guaymas is ideally placed to be such a hub, as it
is just
258 miles from the nearest border crossing point, Nogales in Arizona, although
we note that work
needs to be undertaken to improve road and rail routes
between Mexico and the US. However, some may
fear that Mexico has jumped
on the bandwagon too late. The economic downturn in the US has led to a
fall in the volume of imports that the US is demanding from China. This has
led to reduction in the
number of ships – and thus cargo –
calling at the US' main west coast ports. Both the Ports of Long Beach
and
Los Angeles saw a drop in the amount of inbound container traffic that they
are handling in 2008,
compared with 2007.
BMI’s newly released
Mexico Freight Transport Report notes that with improving intermodal links
we
are forecasting average annual maritime freight growth of 3.1% per
annum (due in part to the increased
movement of cargo through Mexican
ports to avoid congestion in US ports). Over all modes, Mexican
freight
growth will average 3.7% in 2009-2013, ahead of GDP expansion of 3.1% a year.
BMI concludes
that the value of the Mexican transport and communications
sector will rise to US$166bn by 2013,
representing 11.5% of the
country’s total GDP.
During the presidential election campaign in
2006, Calderón spoke of trying to emulate the big transport
infrastructure investment surges in European economies like Ireland and Spain,
which in his view
supported their strong growth rates in the first half of
this decade. BMI rates Mexico’s regulatory and
competitive
environments highly in relation to other regional markets. In this report, in
fact, we set the
country’s overall freight rating score at 46.1 (out
of a maximum of 100).
The transport and communications sector employed
1.90mn people, or 4.6% of the labour force, in 2008.
We see that figure
rising to 1.98mn by 2013, although as a proportion of the labour force it will
remain
constant at 4.6%.
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