Bruce Barnard | Jul 26, 2010 9:23AM EDT
Fesco, owner of Russia’s biggest ocean container carrier, sold its 50 percent stake in National Container Company, a container terminal operator, to an unnamed investor for a reported $900 million.
The investor is an affiliate of First Quantum, an oil trading company that owns the other half of Moscow-based NCC, according to Russian media reports.
First Quantum offered to buy Fesco’s stake in NCC in early 2010 after the companies fell out the previous year over the development of the Ust-Luga container terminal on Russia’s Baltic coast.
First Quantum offered to buy the terminal separately from NCC’s other facilities in a bid to accelerate the development of the project.
Fesco, which paid $375 million for its NCC stake three and-a-half years ago, owns a container terminal and breakbulk terminal in the port of Vladivostok in Russia’s Far East.
NCC’s main assets are the First Container Terminal, the biggest terminal in the port of Saint-Petersburg, and Container Terminal NUTEP in the Black Sea port of Novorossiysk.
It also owns a container terminal in Ukraine and an off-dock terminal and logistics center in Saint-Petersburg.
The Ust-Luga terminal, which NCC started building in April 2007, has a planned annual capacity of 3 million 20-foot equivalent units and is claimed to be the most technologically advanced facility in the countries of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
The FCT terminal in Saint-Petersburg increased first half 2010 traffic by 32.3 percent from a year ago to 619,601 TEUs and throughput in Novorossiysk jumped 38.2 percent to 65,529 TEUs.
The NCC terminals in Russia and Ukraine handled approximately 1.2 million TEUs in 2009.
--Contact Bruce Barnard at brucebarnard47@hotmail.com.