speaker-photo

Christina Prieser

Head of Transport Economics, HPC Hamburg Port Consulting, Germany

Christina Prieser is head of the competence centre transport economics at HPC Hamburg Port Consulting with a focus on business planning and privatisation. During her more than 25 years of experience in ports, shipping, and logistics, she successfully delivered over 30 market forecast and competition studies as well as more than 15 financial analyses and business cases to governments, financing institutions and private clients in the framework of container, multipurpose, and bulk terminal developments worldwide. Furthermore, she was involved in several transaction advisory services for international terminal concessions. Her work experience ranges from projects in several European countries to Latin America (Argentina, Brazil, Guyana, Haiti), (Asia Bangladesh, India, Philippines, Sri Lanka), and Africa (Algeria, Angola, Ghana, Namibia, Sudan). Most recently she has been working on the feasibility study and transaction advisory for the greenfield port in Cherchell, Algeria. Furthermore, she was project manager and successfully completed the business planning and privatisation of the container terminal in Port Sudan. Presently, Christina is project manager for a greenfield container and bulk terminal development from scratch to operational in South America.

16.10 - 16.30 CET

Virtual Ports & Logistics Summit 25 Nov

Private Participation in Ports - Background and Experiences

Being traffic nodes of strategic importance – and as such system relevant – and key drivers of economic and social development, while at the same time requiring high investments, historically most ports were in the public domain. Especially in Africa, ports have been in majority fully owned, financed, and developed by governments, often together with national railways, and also the staff have usually been public employees. In the late 1980’s, private sector participation in ports started particularly in southern Europe, South America, Africa, and South Asia. The reasons were mainly growing globalisation and containerisation together with tighter public budgets. At the same time, expectations regarding public private partnerships have always been high, sometimes too high, especially when it comes to the most important point of risk sharing.

Besides giving a short general background of private sector engagement in ports, the presentation will focus on the numerous aspects to be considered when a private investor is going to take over a public terminal. This will be shown by the example of the container terminal of Port Sudan, where HPC has been involved for more than ten years on behalf of the port authority, first as on site supporter of the operations management, than in the preparation of business plans for the complete port, the selection process and supervision of a private management contractor, and finally in the then following concession process until contract signature.