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The port of Maputo is going to have a citrus fruit terminal to meet demand from South Africa, which accounts for 70% of the movement of this Mozambican port infrastructure, an official source said on Monday.
In an interview with the Lusa news agency, the executive director of the Maputo Porto Development Company (MPDC), Osório Lucas, said the construction of this terminal was among the port’s growth objectives.
“The construction of a citrus terminal from scratch [serves] to respond to demand from the northern zone of South Africa, which is also in the pipeline,” he explained.
According to Osório Lucas, the “market conditions on offer today”, both from the point of view of the South African export market and the conditions of the railway-port infrastructure in South Africa, represent an opportunity for Mozambique, particularly with the expansion of the port of Maputo.
“We felt that this was the right time to go ahead with the request for an extension [of the concession], in line with the terms of the current contract (…) 2022 was the right time to ask because the economic conditions are the best at the moment to risk the investment,” he said.
Investments that are ready to go ahead, he guaranteed, shortly after signing the addendum to the concession contract, approved on 23 January by the cabinet. The concessionaire for the port of Maputo plans to double the volume of cargo handled annually by 2058, with the extension of the contract and overall investments over this period of €2.06 billion (€1.9 billion).
“South Africa accounts for more than 70% of the total volume handled in this port. If you think about minerals alone, last year they accounted for 25 of the 31 million tonnes handled,” said MPDC’s executive director.
Without port infrastructures capable of guaranteeing the volume of exports, Africa’s main economy uses the ports of Mozambique, namely Maputo, to transport all kinds of production, a demand that continues to grow and which has also led MPDC to submit a request for an addendum to extend the concession and invest in its enlargement.
“That explains why we’ve applied for the extension now. This was the window of opportunity for the port of Maputo and for the country,” said Osório Lucas, pointing out that South Africa has publicly recognised the importance of this planned investment in the port infrastructure.
“Although it is a port in Mozambique, it is also a port at the service of the South African economy,” he emphasised.
For Osório Lucas, the key to the success of the port of Maputo lies in the combination of increasing efficiency, with the adoption of new technologies in all phases of the port process, and the increasing training of workers, including a training centre of its own.
This centre has “state-of-the-art equipment, which allows them to come in with a different mindset,” he said.
“And as the port has undergone and is undergoing a very large investment in the technology component – and we know that this generation deals with these things much more easily – we have made the combination of investment in human capital and investment in cutting-edge technologies and equipment that has allowed us to reach productivity levels that sometimes offset, for example, the effect of the exchange rate variation [with South Africa],” he acknowledged.
“The last few years have served to reinvent the business, constantly investing in systems, human capital and infrastructure”.
“When you look at the whole system, what might seem like a slightly more expensive port than South African harbours – sometimes it even seems nominally so – the final gain for the exporter is much greater in Maputo because of the efficiency that has been established,” he concluded.
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