Yang Ming Line appears to have won the "race" to run Kaohsiung's planned Container Terminal 6, and port authorities are about to start contract talks with the Taiwanese carrier.

There was conflicting information from the Kaohsiung Harbour Bureau (KHB), with a spokesman for the KHB telling Cargonews Asia that YML has been judged a "qualifying bidder".

This means the line has passed the qualification checking process but there are understood to be another six companies that submitted bids. The deadline was on Monday, August 6, but the KHB was not divulging any information on whether other bidders were being considered.

"We will now enter into discussions over the contract with Yang Ming and plan to sign the contract in November," the spokesman said, which sounds very much like it's a done deal and YML will be the operators of CT6. However, any emerging clarity was clouded when the spokesman said he was "happy with the quality" of the bidders.

Although he declined to identify the companies, this would appear to suggest they had not yet been discounted and would also have to pass the qualification checking process.

In any event, whoever wins the bid will be the operator of a build-operate-transfer terminal to be developed at an estimated cost of US$364M with four 375m berths and a depth of 16m.

Construction will begin next year and the terminal will be online by 2012. Kaohsiung port will soon reach its container-handling limit, although the KHB spokesman said there would be enough capacity to handle the box volume until the first phase of the three-phase CT6 opened.

This is because the port is losing ground in the container transshipment sector, impacting heavily on Kaohsiung's hub status that once saw it placed third on the world's busiest port list.

Roughly half the containers handled annually are for transshipment but rising competition from ports in China and Southeast Asia is eroding these volumes.

Strong economic development in China has lured business from Taiwan to the mainland, removing a valuable export and import source for the port. This, combined with changes in shipping routes, has impacted port volume.

Last year Kaohsiung reversed the slight decline in throughput, handling 9.77 million TEUs, up just 3.5 percent over 2005. It looks almost certain that Taiwan's biggest port will drop to number seven in the world rankings by the end of the year.