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Ho Chi Minh City on Jan. 30 officially opens a container port, the Saigon Premier Container Terminal (SPCT), after three years of construction.
Covering an area of 23 hectares in the Hiep Phuoc industrial zone of Nha Be district, the specialised container terminal has a handling capacity of 1.5 million TEUs a year. One TEU is equal to a twenty-foot container.
The terminal has two wharves capable of handling large container ships and a spacious container yard which has enough space for up to 15,000 containers of 20 feet. It is, therefore, expected to facilitate exports and imports of seafood and agricultural products of Mekong delta provinces.
SPCT, a joint venture between United Arab Emirate’s DP World and the state-owned Tan Thuan Industrial Promotion Company (IPC), has a total investment of 360 million USD.
After being put into operation, the new port will enable vessels from the East Sea to reach the city through the Soai Rap river instead of the overcrowded Long Tau River .
Speaking at the inauguration ceremony, Minister of Transport Ho Nghia Dung said the SPCT is a good model that should be multipled to make sure portal potentials of provinces across the Soai Rap river can be fully exploited.
After the river is dredged to the depth of negative 9.5 metres, the SPCT will be able to receive container ships with the designed capacity of 5,000 TEU, which will boost the port’s capacity of handling ships on the inter-Asian routes as well as those to more distant destinations in other continents.
SPCT General Director Patrick Bol said that the port has opened as scheduled shows the successful cooperation between his company and the Vietnamese government.
“This has further bolstered our belief in the potentials of the Vietnamese market,” he said, adding that SPCT’s modern facilities and the non-stop development of global trade activities will surely benefit both Vietnam and its business partners.
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