MEGAWIDE Construction Corp. expects to bag P24 billion worth of new contracts within the year, but mainly the construction of private buildings and condominiums.
Edgar Saavedra, the company’s chairman and president, said the figure is the company’s second- largest new projects bagged in a single year.
Its largest was in 2015 when the company had P37.7 billion worth of new contracts.
Despite this, the company will only spend P1 billion in capital expenditures this year, a steep fall from last year’s P5 billion due to the construction of terminal two of Mactan-Cebu International Airport, which it is already operating along with GMR Group.
Saavedra said the biggest among its contracts will still be for the new passenger terminal of Clark International Airport, costing P4.9 bilion.
Megawide with its Indian partner GMR last year won the engineering, procurement and construction of the erminal for P9.36 billion. The company started construction in January and will be completed by 2020.
“We are more on construction of residential condominiums rather than on government projects,” Saavedra said.
He said government projects are scarce these days, except on the civil works projects of the Department of Public Works and Highways, which he said the company is not participating in at all.
“We are interested in the government’s priority projects. That’s where we’re participating,” he said, referring to the big-ticket projects the Duterte administration is pursuing.
Megawide officials said they are still keen on the operations and maintenance of Clark Airport, which the government is bidding separately.
Manuel Louie Ferrer, the company’s chief information officer and also the president of GMR Megawide Cebu Airport Corp., said they are looking at GMR to be its partner for its bid for the 25-year operation of Clark Airport starting in 2020.
The Bases and Conversion Development Authority, however, requires the partner to be listed in Skytrax’s top 20 best airports in the world. Skytrax is a blog site that ranks and reviews airports and airlines in the world based on the views of its readers.
GMR will not qualify in the top 20, not even the top 50 in the world, company officials said.
“Skytrax is not recognized internationally. They do not have the expertise. In major bids, Skytrax ranking is not included as a qualification,” Ferrer said.
The company has until June 20, to decide if it will join the bid process or not.
Saavedra, however, said there are many “challenges” in their bid for Clark, which currently handles between 1.2 million and 1.4 million passengers a year.
Previously, Clark airport was considered to be an alternative to the congested Ninoy Aquino International Airport (Naia), which handles 42 million passengers a year, including passengers of domestic flights.
But the so-called super consortium of conglomerates made an unsolicited bid to renovate and expand the Naia, while the government has approved the unsolicited bid of San Miguel Corp. to build a separate international airport in Bulacan.
“Clark airport is not that attractive anymore as before,” Saavedra said.
Megawide-GMR also submitted their separate unsolicited proposal for the expansion of the Naia.