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A joint venture between Megawide Construction Corporation and GMR Infrastructure Limited has submitted  a US$3 billion unsolicited proposal to rehabilitate, develop, operate and maintain Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA) in Manila, capital city of the Philippines, for an 18-year period.

This puts GMR-Megawide in competition with a consortium of seven of the biggest conglomerates in the Philippines, who submitted an unsolicited proposal for the project last month, as reported on this platform. This proposal is worth roughly US$6.7 billion, with the consortium bidding for a 35-year concession.

GMR-Megawide is proposing to rehabilitate all existing airside, terminal, and landside space at the airport in three main phases. The first will focus on improving airside capacity and implementing terminal improvements, taking two years. The aim of the second phase is to take NAIA to world-class efficiency standards by introducing key performance measures, in another two years. The third two-year phase will build the future capacity of the airport.

The consortium plans to improve airside infrastructure by constructing full-length parallel taxiways for the airport's two runaways and additional rapid-exit taxiways for the primary runway; extending the secondary runway and providing the maximum number of aircraft stands.

A significant difference between this and the other unsolicited proposal, is that the latter provides an option for a third runway. GMR-Megawide has said that this is unviable, whereas focussing on improving the efficiency of the existing airside infrastructure will increase the airport's capacity by 50%.

GMR-Megawide claims that its proposal will increase the airport's movements a day from the current 730 movements to between 950 and 1,000, and increase the overall passenger handling capacity to 72 million per annum. According to the Manila International Airport Authority, NAIA handled almost 37 million passengers (domestic and international) in 2017.

GMR Group and Megawide currently own and operate the Mactan-Cebu International Airport, the Philippines' second largest airport, in a 40:60 joint venture. The consortium were awarded the operations and maintenance concession in April 2014.