The National Administration of Fuel, Alcohol and Portland (Ancap) will advance in a direct association with a private company in the business of portlandafter the public tender in this regard was declared void due to no offer being presented for a sector that represents losses for the state oil company of Uruguay.
The announcement was made by the vice president of Ancap, Diego Durand, during a press conference: “We are going to explore a direct sale. A partnership through a direct purchasing process“, he noted, after the consultation on the steps to be taken by the board after the disappointment in the bidding process that ended on Tuesday.
What Durand did rule out is that there is a new public investment that allows the Portland business to revive by Ancap, as claimed by the oil company’s union. “We are not going to go down that path. What we have explored is investments that come from the private side”, highlighted the vice president of the state company.
Each bag of cement means more losses for Ancap
One of the directors of Portland also referred to the loss-making business in Portland. Ancap, Richard Charamelo, who pointed out that “every bag we sell it’s a loss”. The comment, made in dialogue with the Informal Breakfast program, was to illustrate the difficult situation that the state oil company is going through in this sector, and why the search for alternatives to sustain the business is so important for the company.
In that sense, the director clarified that, despite the fact that the business is loss-making – mainly due to the limit represented by a small market that already has important competitors in Uruguay—, Ancap It cannot end the industry overnight, as jobs are at stake.
“The best thing for Uruguayan society is that we hand this over and that whoever wants to take it, because Ancap It has no way to compete with a private company with the rules we have today. But we know that we cannot do that with a public company and that we have to take care of the workers, that is why we try to find an investor. They have already been invested almost 400 million dollars in the last time and everything was a loss. He invested himself to continue losing money,” said Charmelo.
“With the numbers we have today, it is more business to buy the finished product from the competition than to do it ourselves at Ancap,” added the leader.
Source: Ambito
