BOT - Projects in Asia

Diploma Thesis from the year 2006 in the subject Business economics - Law, grade: 1,5, Nürtingen University (Wirtschaftsrecht), language: English, abstract: The rapidly developing economies in Asia are undergoing unprecedented growth. This explosive development has placed incomparable demands on the existing infrastructure in many countries. Governments struggle with the challenge of providing modern, efficient, and affordable infrastructure services for their people; finding it difficult to finance what are often multimillion dollar projects on their own. Involving the private sector in the financing and operation of infrastructure promises several benefits for both parties. To date the most common sub-type of private participation in infrastructure is the BOT (Build-Operate-Transfer) model, where a project company finances and constructs new infrastructure and operates that infrastructure over a long-term period, before it is transferred back to the government. But despite the long history of projects of this type, only a few are very successful and usually mean more costs than income to the companies. For companies, there is often the difficulty that risks are misjudged, meaning that projects are either canceled completely or, in case of overestimated risks, the bidding price is much higher than the competitors, which ultimately both lead to a loss of image and references. On the other hand, there are more than enough examples of risks being severely underestimated, with the project turning out to be absolutely unprofitable and companies often have to face long and cost-intensive legal disputes. This turns especially fatal when construction companies are also under the sponsors/investors of the project. This dissertation looks first at private participation in infrastructure. Chapter 2 introduces the idea of private participation and the development in Asia as well as the different forms of participation and the sectors of infrastructure. The researched form of private participation in this dissertation is the Build-Operate-Transfer model. This and the relationship between the parties to a BOT project and the relevant documents are discussed in Chapter 3. Tendering procedures are reviewed in Chapter 4 and Chapter 5 discusses issues specific to financing a project and its instruments. The emphasis of this dissertation on risk management is discussed in Chapter 6, with a focus on identification, quantification, reduction and allocation of risks.