The Sangley Point International Airport Consortium (SPIA Consortium), headed by the Yuchengo Family’s House of Investments [HI 3.40] [link], was issued a Notice of Award by the Provincial Government of Cavite to develop the US $11 billion (P630 billion) Sangley Point International Airport Project.
In addition to HI, the SPIA Consortium consists of Cavitex Holdings Inc., Lucio Tan’s MacroAsia Corp. [MAC 5.29 3.32%], Munich Airport International GmbH, Ove Arup & Partners Hongkong Ltd., and Samsung C&T Corp.
The joint press release, issued by HI, says that the SPIA Project will “initially serve as an alternative to NAIA”, and that the airport will be designed to meet “an anticipated increase in demand for air transport in the next 30-40 years.”
The initial design will feature twin runways that can handle up to 75 million passengers per year, but will include expansion plans for up to four runways to handle up to 130 million passengers per year.
MB BOTTOM-LINE
I like the part where they didn’t outline what the SPIA would do after it “initially” serves as a NAIA alternative, however, the implication that the project is intended (at least by the SPIA Consortium) as a replacement to NAIA seemed pretty obvious to me.
There are clearly some powerful interests aligned against the NAIA Rehabilitation project, after the high-profile failures of negotiation between the government and the NAIA Super Consortium, not to mention what happened to Megawide [MWIDE 4.69 1.47%] after its original proponent status on the project was revoked.
Then came the casual mentions of tearing down NAIA altogether (for the benefit of the taxpayer, of course!).
The SPIA bidding process has been weird from the very beginning, and given MAC’s failure to follow-through when it received a Notice of Award for this same project in 2020, I guess all I’m saying here is that I think this is only the first or second chapter in what will undoubtedly be a long (and strange) story.
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