Consortium of Sky Investments and Reliance signs a Concession Agreement with SCZone for a new Multi-Purpose Terminal in East Port Said, Egypt.

Sky Investments is a private investment group, consisting of 12 subsidiaries and 7,000 employees across 4 diversified industries, and has its core focus on the Egyptian market. Among their main subsidiaries is Sky Logistics which is specialized in providing integrated and customized logistics solutions including custom clearance, road transport and ports’ stevedoring activities.

Reliance is a group specialized in bulk commodity trading, logistics, mining & mineral supply, concrete ready mix production and shipping & waste management. As such, Reliance is well positioned in, among others, the Egyptian clinker and cement industries and thereby secures the strategic fit for the Multi-Purpose Terminal.

The Egyptian Suez Canal Economic Zone Development Authority (SCZone) is the port authority of East Port Said (EPS). SCZone announced at COP27 multiple developments to expand the port’s cargo activities, including the new MPT. Aligned with SCZone’s green port ambitions, the following measures are taken by the Consortium to contribute:

Investing in electrical equipment instead of diesel-power equipment where possible.
Investing in energy efficient LED lighting on the terminal.
Investing in rooftop solar panels on warehouses and buildings.
Investing in waste separation, collection and recycling schemes.
Investing in noise emissions measuring systems and noise reduction schemes.
Investing in air quality measuring, closed warehouses, air ventilation systems, dust extraction machines and closed conveyor systems.
Investing in water quality, which focuses on minimizing water consumption at the terminal and implement measures against water pollution (i.e. from washing or oil leakages), and
Investing in biodiversity and green space at the terminal.

Thanks to this Concession, the Consortium becomes the first private organization in Egypt to also operate their entire own MPT. This creates a paradigm shift in Egypt which was typically characterized by practices where MPT terminals are operated by public organizations and only the stevedoring is performed by private companies. It is Sky Logistics’ ambition to handle over 5 million tonnes of cargo in a few years’ time, including among others coal, clinker, cement and scrap metals.

To support this ambition, Sky Logistics asked Maritime & Transport Business Solutions (MTBS) to conduct a full-fledged feasibility study. MTBS is an international finance and strategy advisory firm, offering entrepreneurial business solutions to clients in the maritime and transport sector. Since the company was founded in 2005, MTBS has specialised in ports and terminals, and provides leading expertise in PPP transactions, strategy, valuation, institutional analysis, financing and economic analyses. The firm combines its market sector knowledge and state-of-the-art financial competences into one value proposition: “4P: innovative solutions for Port Public Private Partnerships”.

The entire project took more than a year to complete, says Dirk van Niekerk, manager at MTBS. The first part of the project focused on the market analysis in which the potential of the terminal was verified. This formed the foundation on which the financial feasibility and bankability of the terminal development was tested. Here we looked into the competitive advantages EPS MPT could offer to its clients for various cargo segments being, among others:

The ability to handle larger vessels due to the CD -18 metre depth alongside the quay.
The superior vessel productivity, which is enabled thanks to investments in state-of-the-art vessel equipment and the fact that Sky Logistics will operate its own terminal, and
A location in the proximity of Egypt’s main production and consumption centers including Cairo, the 10th of Ramadan, the Sinai region and Sokhna.

Omar El-Badry, Sky Logistics CEO expressed his happiness with the concluded results and is still looking forward to the new challenge. Thanks to MTBS we were able to finetune our investment planning with the aim of sustaining our intended operational excellence as well as optimizing the provisioned financials of the project. This gives us additional confidence of the choices we are making.