30 local investors want to join North-South Expressway

30 local investors have submitted dossiers to join the construction of the Eastern Cluster of the North-South Expressway

According to Minister of Transport Nguyen Van The, the ministry will appraise the design and estimate the construction costs of the eastern section of the project.

“We expect it to draw bids from 50-60 local investors registering to develop this component of the North-South Expressway project,” The said.

According to the Law on Investment, before the investor is chosen, the authorities cannot build the technical design or complete procedures to start construction. Thus, according to the plan, the construction is expected to kick off in August 2020 after picking the investors.

Previously, many foreign investors have expressed interest in developing the Eastern Cluster of the North-South Expressway, however, about one month ago, the Ministry of Transport (MoT) announced cancelling the international bidding for eight public-private partnership (PPP) sections of the VND118.7 trillion ($5.16 billion) component.

This deicision has disappointed groups such as Daewoo, Lotte, and Hyundai whose engineering and constructions arms had declared strong interest in the project to boost their presence in Vietnam. They were among the domestic, international, and joint venture investors, mainly from China, South Korea, France, and the Philippines, to file 60 prequalification dossiers for the eight PPP sections.

The Eastern Cluster of the North-South Expressway is of national priority for investment in 2017-2020 includes 11 sub-projects with the total length of 654 kilometres running through 13 provinces and cities, three of which will be financed from the state budget and eight will be conducted under the public private partnership (PPP) and build-operate-transfer (BOT) models.

The 11 projects are estimated to cost a total of VND118 trillion ($5.13 billion), including VND55 trillion ($2.39 billion) in state capital to be pumped into three public investment projects, and counterpart funds for the other eight projects.