Seaport Consultants - Port and Transportation Consulting

Brazil

Rio Tinto/Hamersley Iron, Brazil and Argentina. Analysis of river transport options for a large iron ore deposit near Corumbá in Mato Grosso, Brazil involving barging ore down the Paraguay River to a port near Buenos Aires for transfer to ocean vessels. Seaport Consultants Inc investigated river development scenarios, required dredging and navigational improvements, current and possible future towboat and barging rules, and other factors.

Fluor Daniel Wright, Merrill Lynch - N M Rothschild et al, Privatization of Companhia Vale do Rio Doce (CVRD, now Vale). Seaport Consultants Canada joined the Merrill Lynch - N M Rothschild et al consortium study of privatizing CVRD, the Brazilian state mining and industrial holding company. The consortiums client was the National Economic and Social Development Bank of Brazil (BNDES).

Seaport was responsible for reviews of the ports of Tubarão and Ponta da Madeira, and Navegação Vale do Rio Doce S/A (Docenave), CVRDs bulk shipping company. The work involved evaluating the management and operations of the ports, and modeling the ports financial performances over the next 15 years as part of the valuation exercise. The study also involved detailed financial evaluation and modeling of Docenave.

As measures of the scale of the project, CVRD was worth some US$10 billion in total and the share offering is US$3.4 billion. The ports of Tubarão and Ponta da Madeira handled between them over 100 million tonnes a year of cargo (Tubarão is the worlds largest 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.