In this study of privatizing CVRD, Seaport Consultants Canada Inc. was responsible for reviews of the ports of Tubarão and Ponta da Madeira, and Navegação Vale do Rio Doce S/A (Docenave), CVRD's bulk shipping company. The work involved evaluations of the management and operations of the ports, and modeling the ports' financial performances over the next fifteen years as part of a valuation exercise. The study also involved detailed financial evaluations and modeling of Docenave.

As measures of the scale of the project, CVRD was then worth some US $10 billion in total and the initial share offering in the first half of 1997 was US $3.4 billion. The ports of Tubarão and Ponta da Madeira handled between them over 100 million tonnes a year of cargo (Tubarão was then the world's largest dry bulk loading port). Docenave, then the tenth largest bulk shipping company in the world in terms of beneficially-owned dead-weight tonnage, transported over 30 million tonnes a year of bulk and semi-bulk cargoes.