The Phnom Penh Autonomous Port (PPAP) announced a new partnership on Tuesday with Vietnamese company Viet Sac Port Service to set up local maintenance and repair service of shipping containers at its new LM17 container terminal located 30 kilometres south of Phnom Penh in Kandal province.

Hei Bavy, chief executive of PPAP, said yesterday that the state-run port was looking to partner with shipping firms that could handle maintenance services for a long time, due to the ports insufficient in-house capabilities.

While the port did in fact offer repair services in the past, the quality was not recognised by clients and forced them to send containers to Thailand or Vietnam for lengthy repairs.

“Container owners always demanded that we have maintenance services in our port,” he said, adding that most ports internationally carry that service. “Now, if the container is broken in our port, we can provide standard quality repairs, saving time and money for clients.”

Bavy explained that PPAP will provide the space for the repair service while Viet Sac Port Service will be in charge of providing the actual maintenance and the human resources for the operations. Prices for the service will vary according to container size.

This is the second agreement in two weeks that the port has signed with a Vietnamese company. Last week, PPAP signed a deal with the Vietnamese firm Global Logistics Services for lift-on, lift-off services.

Port container traffic in the capital, a measure of the flow of containers between land and sea transport methods, decreased by 6.79 percent during the first quarter compared with the same period last year.

However, PPAP, which became the third company to list on the Cambodian Securities Exchange (CSX) last December, raising $5.2 million in its IPO, showed healthy second-quarter growth.

The company recorded total revenue of $3.65 million for from April to June of this year, an increase of 5 per cent compared to the same period in 2015. The company’s net profit grew by 13 per cent year-on-year to $746,170 during the period.

The river port is Cambodia’s second largest port by throughput.