Turkish airport operator ‘ready’ for third airport competition

Sefer LEVENT - Hürriyet/ISTANBUL

TAV CEO Sani Şener says they are prepared for Istanbul’s third airport tender.

The major Turkish airport developer and operator TAV, one of the bidders for Istanbul’s third airport tender, has said it is ready for the tender scheduled for May 3. TAV CEO Sani Şener said they had prepared their bid with 17 consulting firms.

Şener said the zone, where the third airport was planned to be built in Istanbul, used to be a mining site, adding that a serious engineering work would have to be undertaken. “We worked on it [the tender] with 17 international consulting companies and 70 staff who focused on it. We know the truth about the cost. We are ready for arm wrestling,” he said.

Şener stated that TAV was building airports in Doha and Abu Dhabi, stressing that they were experienced about the airport-building process including credit facilities, project designing, building and operations.

In order to spark the competition for the third airport, the Transportation Ministry introduced some amendments to the specifications last week. The changes made in the specifications included lifting the three-company limit for consortiums and the requirement for a dominant partner owning a 51 percent share.

The project will be conducted using a Build-Operate-Transfer arrangement with the cooperation of the private and public sectors. The state will guarantee the amount of passengers and tariff levels for a certain amount of time.

Until now, 15 Turkish and two foreign companies have bought the tender specification document which is worth 100,000 Turkish Liras. Turkey’s many leading companies, such as Doğuş Holding, Sabancı Holding and İÇ Holding had declared their interest in the tender. Following the finalization of the tender approval, the first phase of construction is set to be completed in 2017 and will provide an initial capacity of 90 million passengers a year. Once all six of the planned runways are complete, the capacity then has the potential to increase to 150 million passengers.