Joint venture to ease paperwork at port

JAKARTA (JP): An electronic data interchange (EDI) will improve the system of export and import documentation at Tanjung Priok seaport here, an executive says.

Arief A. Soedjono, the manager for finance and administration of PT Sisindosat Lintasbuana, an information technology company, said yesterday that the facility will be provided by a joint venture between his company and PT Pelabuhan Indonesia II, the state-owned company assigned to manage a number of seaports including Tanjung Priok.

"The two companies will finalize negotiations on the establishment of the joint venture in the near future," he said.

He said Sisindosat will control a maximum stake of 49 percent in the planned joint venture.

Companies other than Pelabuhan Indonesia II will be welcome to participate in the venture, he said.

Arief said the joint venture will ease the paperwork at the port, thereby helping to smoothen the flow of goods.

Sisindosat is jointly owned by the cooperative of Indosat, the state-owned international telecommunications company, and by the foundation of Indosat employees.

Fiber optic

Meanwhile, an executive of Indosat said yesterday that the company will operate a US$700 million underwater fiber-optics communication cable system, called Seamewe 2, later this month.

The system, stretching 18,190 kilometers and linking 13 nations in Southeast Asia, the Middle East and western Europe, has a capacity of 565 megabytes per second per fiber pair.

The project, which has six submarine cable segments and one land segment, is owned by 40 international parties, including Indosat and its subsidiary PT Satelindo.

The executive also said that Indosat signed an agreement in Kuala Lumpur last Friday to establish another 12,000-kilometer submarine fiber-optic cable network connecting Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Indonesia.

The $524 million project will be able to handle 786,240 telephone calls simultaneously and can be connected to another fiber-optic cable built by Australia.

Construction of the project will begin next year and will be completed in Nov. 1996. (icn)