The first phase of Khalifa Port & Industrial Zone (KPIZ) in Abu Dhabi, which is expected to be two-thirds the size of Singapore, is estimated to cost around 26.5 billion dirhams, CEO Tony Douglas told Reuters.
"We're in the order of about 11 billion dirhams of it, that's already committed," said the executive, who took the helm of Abu Dhabi Ports in June. "I think we've done about 6 billion dirhams (in contracts) in the last three or four months."
"The contracts include the port island construction phase which is obviously from the ground up," he said. "so, that's all the port buildings, all of the infrastructure that goes on top of the port and all of the systems."
KPIZ will be built over five phases and the state-owned company is also developing smaller ports in Abu Dhabi.
Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, the world's third-largest oil exporter, is investing billions of dollars in infrastructure, real estate and tourism to diversify its economy away from oil.
The first phase of Khalifa Port is scheduled to open in 2012, and will replace Abu Dhabi's existing main port of Mina Zayed, with an initial capacity of 2 million twenty foot equivalent units (TEUs) of containers and 9 million tonnes of general cargo.
When completed, Khalifa Port will have a capacity of 15 million TEUs of containers and 35 million tonnes of general cargo.
Douglas said the company has credit lines with National Bank of Abu Dhabi, Al Hilal Bank, Union Bank and HSBC.
"The equity side of (the balance sheet) is supported by Abu Dhabi government and we've got a soft loan arrangement in place with Abu Dhabi government on a secondary debt facility from the four banks," he said. (Reuters)
