Dutch-Bangla jt venture ICD opens in Ctg next month

FE Report A Dutch-Bangla joint venture inland container depot (ICD) in the port city of Chittagong would be launched into commercial operation December 13 next, company officials told the FE Sunday. The depot named BM Container Depot in the Sitakunda area in the port city is the country's second largest private container terminal in terms of its capacity and size, they added. Mostafizur Rahman, managing director of the depot, told the FE Sunday, "We've taken all necessary preparations to launch commercial operation of our depot." Ambassador of Netherlands AJAJMG Hennekens, local MPs, port officials and business people will join the inauguration programme. The depot has been set up on 24 acres of land and built at a cost of Tk 1.5 billion plus. The private container depot, just 21 kilometres away from the country's premier seaport and 250 kilometres from capital Dhaka, has a 170,000-metre container freight station. The depot has the capacity to handle over 12000 TEUs (twenty-foot equivalent units) at a time. Chittagong Denims, one of the country's few denim making companies, in association with Smart Jeans, has joined Pronk Participatie BV, a Dutch company, to build the ICD. Its civil construction work began in 2009. "It's technologically superb. We've used state-of-the-art technology to develop the ICD," Mostafizur Rahman, who owns both Chittagong Denims and Smart Jeans, told the FE Sunday. Eighteen inland container depots located in a 20-kilometre peripheral area around Chittagong port handle the country's 100 per cent export cargoes and 17 import items or nearly 15 per cent of the country's total imports. The country's inland container depots, or the off-docks, dealt with around 73 per cent of the country's external trade during the last fiscal year handling more than 900,000 TEUs. Off-docks began its journey in Bangladesh from 1997 through the launching of Iqbal Depot.