ARCHIVED - Three bidders for Corvera airport management contract

Aena will compete with Corporacion America and Edeis for the Corvera contract

The first phase of the process by which the regional government will award the new management contract at the unopened Region of Murcia International Airport in Corvera has now been completed, and after the deadline for the presentation of bids expired on Tuesday the government has confirmed that three companies have tendered for the contract.

The three bidders, who were listed by the government in alphabetical order in order to ensure that none is afforded preferential treatment, are Aena (the part State-owned company which currently runs all but one of Spain’s operational airports), Corporación América from Argentina, and Edeis, a French company which has recently taken over the management of the airport of Castellón, in the north of the Valencia region of Spain.

Announcing the results of the first phase of the tender process, Pedro Rivera, the regional minister for Development and Infrastructures, explained that there may yet be other bids which have failed to reach the government for “technical reasons”, and that there now begins a period of ten days in which the bidders can supply complementary information. However, for the time being it appears that these three companies are those which will compete to manage the new airport in Corvera for the first 25 years of its operational life.

At the same time, Sr Rivera reiterated that the aim is to reach an annual passenger total of 3.5 million at Corvera, and that the quality of the bids presented is encouraging for the achievement of this objective. The next step towards opening the airport will be to analyse the three bids in depth before a 60-day period begins in which more detailed proposals concerning the airport’s management will be presented.

At this point it will fall to the government to evaluate the bids and to award the contract to the most deserving candidate, a process which Pedro Rivera insists will be carried out as quickly as possible but without undue haste.

Aena’s credentials are well established in Spain and worldwide – the company manages 46 airports in Spain and another 15 in America and the rest of Europe, and deals with 230 million passengers per year - but less is known about the other two bidders (although Pedro Rivera points out that they are all highly qualified), and it is important to clarify who they are.

Corporación América, according to the company website, is “an Argentine holding which has thrived on its dynamism and versatility to successfully develop completely diverse enterprises in highly competitive markets and in different parts of the world”. Having started out in the textile industry, it expanded into other fields, including communications and television, and now operates the airport and cargo terminals at 53 airports in Latin America and Europe, where it carries 70 million passengers per year.

The company is owned by 84-year-old Eduardo Eurnekian, an Armenian-Argentine who is one of the richest individuals in Argentina.

Edeis currently manages 19 airports, all but one of them in France, where the company is based. The other is the airport of Castellón, where Edeis took over from the Canadian concern SNC-Lavalin in December 2016, and since then passenger numbers have grown: in the first quarter of this year there were 27,000, and there are now regular Ryanair flights to and from London, Bristol, Sofía (Bulgaria) and Poznan (Poland), as well as Blue Air services between Castellón and Bucharest (Rumania).

Of particular interest in relation to Corvera is the fact that Edeis has experience in taking over airports from the national government of France and running them in collaboration with regional and local authorities.