The Ethiopian Shipping & Logistics Services Enterprise (ESLSE) is preparing to award the design and construction contract, for a 5,400sqm stuffing and stripping warehouse, to a grade one construction company. The project, for which the company offered the least price of 80.5 million Br, includes a container freight station that is also to be built at the Modjo dry port.
The bid committee at the Enterprise would not disclose the name of the winner until higher officials approve of the decision. This will happen within the next two weeks, according to officials at the ESLSE.
The winner was selected out of five companies that participated in a tender, floated in October 2012. These included; Flintstone Engineering, Yotek Construction Plc, Yirgalem Construction Plc, Afrotsion Construction Plc and Orbit Engineering & Construction.
Red Sea Construction also participated in the tender, but failed the technical evaluation, conducted on November 14, 2012.
The construction of the warehouse is part of the second phase expansion project at Modjo dry port, located 73Km east of the capital, for which the ESLSE is planning to spend around half a billion Br. The warehouse and station will be used by the customs authority at the port for the storage of goods awaiting further inspection.
Usually the machine scanner at ports classifies goods into green, yellow and red in the computer database. Green shipments are ones whose documents are complete and are free to be transferred to their owner immediately.
If documents are incomplete or a slight mistake is reported in the documents shipment are classified as yellow and will be offloaded for further inspection at the container freight station, which will take around seven days, according to Abebe Gudissa, port & facility development director at ESLSE.
Shipments that the machine classifies as red are the ones that do not match in number or in type to the documents attached to them. These will be stored in a stuffing and stripping warehouse until the customs authority takes further action.
So far, the Modjo dry port has only had a temporary stuffing and stripping warehouse, lying on 3,000sqm of land. The port, which began operations on 63ha of land in 2009, has the capacity to handle 6,000 containers that are six metres in size, at a time, but has on average of 7,900 containers that stay for up to 49 days.
The ESLSE is planning to construct four sluffing and stripping warehouses on four hectares of land for the second phase of the Modjo expansion. The project it is awarding now will be the second of the four. The previous year, the Enterprise awarded the construction of the first of these warehouses to Afrotsion Construction Plc, a grade one general contractor, for 67 million Br. Afrotsion currently also handles the Addis Abeba University expansion projects in Jimma, Mekelle and Gondar.
In the financial evaluation for the current tender, only two of the companies managed to present offers less than 85 million Br, which is the cost of construction estimated by the consulting engineer, Construction & Design Share Company (CDSCo). The building, road and water works construction consultant established in 1986, also handles the supervision of the entire Modjo II expansion project.
The highest offer made amounted to 166.9 million Br. The project, once awarded, will be expected to be finished within a year.
The previous project, awarded to Afrotsion, was expected to be completed by now, but it is still ongoing. The contractors for these projects use prefabricated structures to construct the warehouses. These took a long time to arrive, which has caused the delay, according to Abebe.
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