Megawide in talks with 3 groups for ‘Orthopedic’ bid

MANILA, Philippines - Megawide Construction Corp. is in talks with three groups including The Medical City, a foreign company and a major local entity with expertise in hospital operation, for a joint bid to rehabilitate the 68-year old Philippine Orthopedic Center in Quezon City, informed sources said.

Sources said the construction and engineering firm hopes to select a partner soon ahead of the auction scheduled on Mar. 26 to further bolster its bid.

 Megawide, whose expertise is construction, needs a partner to operate the hospital should it succeed in bagging the 25-year contract.

The Orthopedic modernization is a build-operate-transfer project involving the construction of a 700-bed super-specialty tertiary orthopedic hospital located within the National Kidney and Transplant Institute compound along East Ave.

The winning bidder is required to reserve 420 beds exclusively for PhilHealth-sponsored patients and 70 beds for indigent patients.

Aside from Megawide, other entities that signified interest in the P5.6-billion project include Metro Pacific Investments Corp., Siemens Inc. Healthcare Sector, GE Health Care General Electric Phils., Sta. Clara International Corp., Mount Grace Hospital Ventures, Philips Electronic & Lighting Inc. and Data Trail Corp.

Prospective bidders have until Feb. 5 to buy bid documents. The deadline for submission is on March 21 while the awarding of the contract will be held after the election in May.

Megawide has been actively participating in projects offered by the government under the Public-Private Partnership program.  It won two school infrastructure projects involving the construction of a total of 7,144 classrooms in Region III and Region IV-A.

Including the school projects, Megawide’s current order book is valued at around P26 billion as of end-Sept last year.  This is expected to translate to P16 billion in revenues this year, double its forecast for 2012.

The company is currently negotiating with Metro Pacific to jointly bid for the $377.6 million Ninoy Aquino International Expressway, a four-lane, 7.75 kilometer elevated expressway and 2.22 kilometer feeder road that will link three terminals of the NAIA with each other and to the Entertainment City along Roxas Boulevard.

The NAIA expressway project, one of the big-ticket infrastructure projects under Pres. Aquino’s PPP, aims to reduce to eight minutes the average 24- minute travel time for passengers from Skyway to NAIA Terminal I.

Megawide is presently building a P1 billion one-stop pre-cast concrete manufacturing facility in Taytay, Rizal, envisioned to the first of its kind in the country and one of the largest  in the region.

Given an expanded project portfolio, Megawide is looking at a net income of P1.5 billion to P1.6 billion this year, up 78percent from the estimated P1 billion earnings in 2012.