African Railroads Project

On 3rd Feb 2017, Aconex Portugese enterprise agreement partner, Mota-Engil Enterprise and Turkish company, Yapı Merkezi, signed a JV deal worth US$1.215 billion with Tanzania to construct a 300-kilometer railway line as part of plans by the east African country to boost trade with the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Zambia, Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda.


Mota Engil is currently working with Aconex on projects as large as the €3 billion New Lisbon Airport , scheduled for completion this year.


The original enterprise agreement with Mota Engil, which is active in Europe, Africa and the Americas, shows the company initially standardised its global project portfolio on Aconex in 2010:

“With operations across Europe, Africa and the Americas, Mota-Engil uses the Aconex platform during the tender and preliminary stages of all of its construction projects worldwide. The company has used the platform on a number of projects in Portugal, which led to a corporate agreement to standardize on Aconex.”

The Tanzanian state run railway firm, RAHCO, said construction of the new railway line would start in March and take 30 months to be completed.

In total, Tanzania wants to build a US$ 9 bn, 2,561 km standard gauge railway network connecting its main Indian Ocean port of Dar es Salaam with its landlocked neighbours in the eastern and southern African hinterland, in addition to its existing rail network.

RAHCO has not given final details on how this major infrastructure project is to be financed but “last July Tanzania said it had secured a $7.6 billion loan from China's Export-Import Bank (Exim) to build part of the new railway network.” The country also sought financing from Turkey for a 400 km stretch during a January visit from Turkish President, Recep Erdogan (see photo).

RAHCO is keen to start more construction projects and, this month, will announce winners of bids for four other tenders for construction of additional standard gauge railway lines, covering about 1,000 km.

Aconex has a sales and service office in Johannesburg SA from where it supports its African projects.

Unless the Mota Engil EA has inexplicably lapsed, this looks very much like one of Aconex’s latest projects in Africa.

With the US$7.6bn Chinese financing loan from the China's Export-Import Bank (Exim) in place, it can also be viewed as an OBOR project. China has intentions of helping build high speed rail across Tanzania and the African continent.



Railway Construction in Tanzania...................Turkey & Tanzania signing railway agreements, Jan 2017
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This post is based on my own research and is not investment advice. When making investment decisions, always DYOR.