Panama A World of Opportunities
By Juan Carlos Martinez
Panama's current administration has a very ambitious investment plan for its five year period totaling close to 13 billion dollars. This investment plan is detailed in the strategic plan this administration put together and includes major infrastructure projects such as the last stage of the Panama-Colon highway, the rebuilding of the Colon Free Zone streets, connecting Howard with the Centenario bridge, connecting Tocumen Airport with the Tocumen cargo terminal, building new airports in the Central Provinces, a new transport system comprised of Metrobus and the Metro, a government city, a new convention center, housing solutions, among others.
There are several areas the government specifically intends to focus on such as tourism, logistics, and nontraditional agricultural products. All major projects by law must be opened up for bidding and currently there are several large projects in different stages of the process. Metrobus, a new transport system designed to replace the old buses called “diablos rojos”, (aka Red Devils) has received and opened the proposals tendered by interested companies and are currently in the process of evaluating the proposals received. A multi-million hospital project valued at USD386 million just received the proposals the first week of June and the commission evaluating the proposals has 20 days to study the proposals. This project is for building or rebuilding five hospitals in diverse areas of the country. Companies could bid on one, several or all of the five hospitals.
The Metro project on the other hand has just recently completed the validation stage where the government representatives meet with companies that may be interested in bidding for the project. The project is explained, and companies have an opportunity to put forth their opinions. These are studied and if necessary the “Request for Proposal” will be changed to reflect the consensus reached. Proposals for the Metro will be received on July 30. Another unusual aspect of the Metro project is that it is so huge that it went through a pre-qualification process where all the companies interested submitted information and were weeded out so only the ones that actually complied with the requirements were pre-qualified to participate in the bidding process.
There is another project which the government announced since its campaign to bring down the cost of the basic food basket (in Spanish “canasta básica”): the “Cadena de Frio”. This is in English literally the Cold Chain and it is basically helping the food producers to get their product to market with the least number of intermediaries by building more food markets equipped with cold rooms to minimize food loss, new storage centers, among other things in other to help local producers. This project is in its initial stages and the request for proposal is about to be finished so it can be published in Panama's public procurement portal www,panamacompra.gob.pa
Other large infrastructure projects that are already adjudicated, meaning that they have undergone all these steps and the winning bidder selected and notified, are the remodeling of the David Airport, the restructuring of the road from David to Boquete, among others.
There really are many opportunities available including the inclusion for foreign companies who are already amply represented in many of these bidding processes.
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