The Philippine’s Department of Education has just selected four local construction companies – by name, Megawide, BF Corporation, DM Wenceslao & Associates and Vicente T. Lao Constructors/BSP & Co. Inc. – as pre-qualified bidders for the School Infrastructure Project Phase II public-private partnership (PPP).
This will be at least the fourth Philippine PPP to have selected its pre-qualified bidders. The government hopes to shortlist bidders sometime in June, with a final winner or winners to be announced in August, according to a government spokesperson. The Philippines currently has about eight PPP projects in different stages of procurement.
Once selected, the winners will be expected to finance, design, construct and furnish 10,679 one-storey and two-storey classrooms in 5,033 public schools across 14 regions nationwide.
The remuneration for the investors in this project falls under the “bill-transfer scheme”: once the classrooms are completed, the developer will transfer the classrooms over to the government, which will reimburse them for the construction costs and pay them a reasonable additional amount for a return – to be determined in the winner’s final proposal, according to a source with direct knowledge of the matter.
As part of the next round, each of the developers will have to build two classroom buildings in different parts of the country in order to be evaluated. The construction firms must turn the projects over to the government for evaluation on or before June 17, according to the government’s website.
Although the bidding process is open to foreign and domestic infrastructure investors, all the pre-qualified bidders in this project are local. Infrastructure Investor’s source believes that if a foreign developer wanted to participate in the Philippine PPP projects, it would have to partner with a local developer in order to be successful.