Vinalines chairman Duong Chi Dung, who also serves as general director, said his company would develop the first two wharves for the deep-water port plus storage and other support facilities. The complex will become the country’s largest shipping infrastructure complex.

Dung said in a statement that the two wharves, with a combined length of 650 meters and covering 41.5 hectares, would be built from now till 2013. The two berths upon completion can handle large vessels of up to 9,000 twenty-foot-equivalent units (TEU), allowing for annual cargo throughput of 710,000 TEUs per year.

According to the master plan prepared by the national maritime administration, the transshipment port complex would be developed in four phases, including the start-up phase by Vinalines with an investment of VND4 trillion (USD250 million).

Soon after the start-up phase will come development in the first phase from 2010 to 2015, when four more wharves for ships up to 9,000 TEUs and four berths for feeder ships will be set up in the eastern part of Dam Mon area. The first phase development will cover 118-125 hectares, while the berths will stretch a combined 1,680 to 2,260 meters, allowing the port to handle up to 2.1 million TEUs of cargo.

The second phase will follow on until 2020, with eight wharves to be built for vessels of up to 12,000 TEUs, plus eight berths for feeder ships. After this second phase, the total handling capacity of the port complex will be raised to between 4.0 and 4.5 million TEUs per year.

In the end, the port complex will have a total of 25 container wharves for very large vessels of up to 15,000 TEUs and 12 wharves for feeder ships, with the total handling capacity of 14.5 to 17 million TEUs per year.

Vinalines, the project owner of the start-up phase, is arranging funds for the project, using its own capital, banks’ loans and working capital pooled from its financial investment.

The start-up phase of Van Phong’s first two berths has been delayed for a long time due to changes to its scale. Under the previous plan approved by the Government, the wharves were designed to receive ships of 6,000 TEUs only.

Van Phong Bay is a big bay to the east of Vietnam with 43,500 hectares of water surface and a depth of 15-22 meters, and is only 14km from international waters and in close proximity to the junction of shipping lanes. Given its favorable natural conditions and potentials, the Government has approved a plan to develop the area into an international transshipment port and a multi-purposed economic complex of commerce, industry and tourism.

Transport experts said after many “sleeping” years, the port complex now should be pumped with sufficient investment to become an international transit port able to receive the world’s biggest cargo ships.

With the mammoth funds of USD3.6 billion during more than 10 years of development, the container transshipment port is listed as a key project of the country.

The Government has suggested Vinalines and the Transport Ministry to call for prestigious and experienced foreign investors to join the project.

The transshipment port, which in the long term will become the key facility for multimodal transport development, should be able to compete with other container transshipment ports currently operating in the region such as Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan’s Kaohsiung.