Tuesday, 8 December 1998

Government and Developers Sign Land Grants for Container Terminal 9

The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government signed the land grants for the development of Container Terminal 9 (CT9) with the three joint developers, Asia Container Terminals (ACT), Modern Terminals Limited (MTL), and Hongkong International Terminals (HIT) today (Tuesday).

Speaking at the signing ceremony, the Acting Secretary for Planning, Environment and Lands, Mr Patrick Lau, said, "CT9 is a very complicated project, involving not only many difficult technical issues but also complex commercial negotiations among the parties concerned. I congratulate the efforts made by all three developers in reaching agreement on the detailed arrangement for the construction of the terminal and the allocation of the berths.

"The construction of CT9 is important to Hong Kong not only because it will provide sufficient capacity to meet the long term demand of our container port, but it will also enable us to rationalise the allocation of the terminals at Kwai Chung.

"Following the rationalisation of the berths as part of the CT9 deal, there will be more contiguous berths at Kwai Chung, giving the operators more flexibility and capability to handle the larger and larger container vessels being built by the international shipping lines."

Mr Lau said, "CT9, therefore, is a very important part of our port development strategy to maintain our competitiveness and strengthen our position as an international container hub port. As part of the project, Rambler Channel, the main access channel to all the terminals at the Kwai Chung Container Port, will be dredged to -15.5m water depth, enabling Hong Kong to handle the future generations of container vessels which will carry more than 8 000 containers each."

"The construction of CT9 will create over 1 500 jobs. The actual number will be more as there will be many new employment opportunities created in those trades which operate around the container terminal, such as container lorry drivers, container depot operators and barge operators etc."

"The consortia will invest over $10 billion in the project in the next five years. These are very major companies with a long history and a lot of experience in Hong Kong. The agreement on CT9 is a clear demonstration of their commitment to Hong Kong and their confidence in the long term prospect of our container port and economy," Mr Lau said.

The Chairmen of the three companies, Mr Canning Fok of HIT, Mr Gonzaga Li of MTL and Mr William Flynn of ACT signed the land grants for CT9 with the Director of Lands, Mr Bob Pope today. As part of the agreement for CT9, MTL and ACT also signed a commercial agreement to swap the two MTL berths at CT8 with ACT's two berths right in CT9 when CT9 is completed.

The Land Grant conditions require the consortia to form 140 hectares of land along the east side of Tsing Yi Island. On completion they will be granted 70 hectares for the construction of CT9. The rest of the area will be handed back to the Government for the provision of roads and container backup facilities to relieve the overcrowding problem in Kwai Chung.

The new terminal will have six berths and a design capacity to handle 2.6 million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs) of containers a year. Together with the facilities at Kwai Chung, the new terminal will be able to cope with forecast growth in demand of the Hong Kong Container Port until the early 2000s.

Construction work will begin in mid 1999. The first berth of the new terminal is expected to come into operation in 2002. The remaining berths will come into operation at five/six months intervals thereafter. The timing is in accordance with the forecast requirements of the Hong Kong Port and Maritime Board.