A consortium, comprising French and Chinese companies, officially signed a concession agreement for the container terminal in the new port of Kribi, Cameroon on July 25, 2017.
Following an international call to tenders, the consortium of the French groups CMA CGM and Bolloré Transport & Logistics as well as the Chinese group CHEC, were granted the funding and the operation of the Kribi Container Terminal, which they will manage for 25 years under a public-private partnership with the State of Cameroon.
Currently equipped with a 350-metre-wide, 16-metre-deep dock, the Kribi terminal can host ships of an 8,000 TEUs-capacity.
In phase 2, Kribi Containers Terminal will operate 11,000 TEUs vessels and have a 715-metre dock, 32 hectares of open ground, and the capacity to process 1.3 million TEUs. CMA CGM informed that the latest dock and yard gantry cranes will be put into service in the coming weeks so that operations can get started rapidly.
The containers terminal will be backed by a solid and complementary shareholder base, namely, CMA CGM, which ships more than 35% of containers from the West African Coast and operates over 30 terminals worldwide, Bolloré Transport & Logistics, which has been operating in Africa and Cameroon for over 50 years, the Chinese CHEC, a builder that is highly active in infrastructure development in Cameroon, and private reference Cameroonian operators that want to support the project.