EcoRodovias speeds project of new cargo terminals
Valor Econômico 05/15/2009
One of the biggst highway concessionaires of the country, responsible for the Anchieta/Imigrantes system, in São Paulo, and the Paraná and Rio Grande do Sul routes, EcoRodovias is making real a plan to turn it into a great logistics company as well. The company opened, in the end of last year, a 400 thousand square meter yard for the operation of containers in Cubatão (SP), and it should open an even bigger one in the Imigrantes highway in 2011, and it plans two other centers of the kind in other routes managed by the concessionaire. The projection is that in four years the logistics area will correspond to 20% of the earnings of the group, which ended 2008 at almost R$ 900 million (US$ 428.6 million).
According to the president of EcoRodovias, Marcelino Rafart de Seras, the plan to develop the logistics area associated to the activity of concession began back in 1998, right after it undertook the Imigrantes highway, but it had to wait until 2003 to start being executed - after the heaviest investments in highways and the financial turbulence that struck the country in 2002. The view of the executive is that all operations of the group involve important tour and export/import routes, and the entrance in the logistics sector does not change the focus of the company. The first initiative, Ecopátio Cubatão, went into operation in the end of last year and it receives an average of 1.5 thousand trucks a day in its regulating yard. The space should gain a new service still this month, a metal mechanics center for the repair of empty containers, and there are negotiations for the setting up of an intermodal center for the operation of full containers. The center will integrate the railroad modal, aggregating one line of MRS that passes by a few meters from the yard and EcoRodovias intends to open the first water modal service to load commodities in the ships of the terminals of Santos - through the system, the cargo leaves the yard and follows on barges to the ships. The company also has plans of betting in the operation of wet terminals in the very port of Santos.