Passenger Rail Agency of SA says more than 60 rolling stock manufacturers and their partner companies bought tender documents for the R120bn rolling stock fleet renewal programmes.

More than 60 rolling stock manufacturers and their partner companies bought tender documents for the R120bn rolling stock fleet renewal programmes being run by state-owned Passenger Rail Agency of SA (Prasa), the agency’s CEO Lucky Montana said this week.

The response has heartened Mr Montana, who said two years ago that sceptics had doubted Prasa would get to the point of soliciting bids for new Metrorail coaches.

The companies include original equipment manufacturers from Europe and Asia, Mr Montana said. “That is at least 70% of those manufacturers that participated in our earlier market engagements, which means that companies are showing real interest and paying attention to our programme,” he said.

But last week French power and rail company Alstom expressed disappointment over the evaluation weightings indicated in the tender documents for the fleet renewal programme, according to Andreas Knitter, Alstom’s senior vice-president for transport for north and central Europe and Africa.

The tender documents showed that in evaluating bids for the programme Prasa would give a 15% weighting to local content development and 85% of the evaluation weighting would be on the price competitiveness, Mr Knitter said.

“It’s more expensive to build here than to import (the coaches), so it would be better if they had given a higher weighting to the economic development component,” he said. “We think we shouldn’t be penalised twice because of the local content requirements and then still have to compete on price,” he said.

Alstom is already part of state-owned power utility Eskom’s competitive supplier development programme, an initiative of the Department of Trade and Industry to use government spending on infrastructure to stimulate investment in SA’s industrial base.

Alstom has supplied boilers, generators and instrumentation for Eskom’s new coal-fire power stations. Under that programme, Alstom has managed to procure 65% of its components from investing in local industrial capacity.

Mr Knitter said Alstom was ready to “copy and paste” the approach it had used with the power programme in SA. “We think it would be more appropriate to have a lower level of weighting for the price evaluation.”

Alstom would like to see the bid evaluation weighting for local content to be closer to the 25% to 30% mark, Mr Knitter said, which would allow for investment by rolling stock manufacturers.

The project to acquire 7200 coaches for Metrorail over the next 20 years has been structured as one 10-year period in which 3600 coaches must be delivered, with the option to extend the programme for a similar period.

Source:http://www.businessday.co.za