§ 1.3. Corporate Environment

Port Manatee's expansion and diversification program over the past decades has created a solid corporate mix of long-term and more recent terminal operators, stevedores, agents, and other users. Each of the Port's primary dry bulk, breakbulk, and liquid bulk terminal operators as well as the companies offering liner and stevedoring services have significant global reach, as evidenced by the brief profiles below.

•  Logistec USA Inc. Logistec is one of the largest cargo-handling companies on Canada's East Coast and a growing player on the U.S. East Coast. The company's principal activities are marine services to industrial and shipping companies. These services include cargo-handling and terminal operations at 30 ports and terminals in eastern North America. Logistec's core business is stevedoring: the loading and unloading of ships using specialized equipment and experienced personnel. A long-term tenant at Port Manatee, Logistec handles all of Fresh Del Monte's palletized and containerized commodities.

•  Fresh Del Monte Produce, Inc. Another long-term tenant at Port Manatee, Del Monte, which provides liner services at the Port, is one of the world's leading vertically integrated producers, marketers, and distributors of fresh and fresh-cut fruit and vegetables as well as a leading producer and distributor of prepared fruit and vegetables, juices, beverages, snacks, and desserts in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. The company grows, packs, ships, and distributes its own products.

Del Monte's specialty is the production of fruits such as pineapples, melons, bananas, plantains and other exotic produce, all sourced from its own farms and from select third-party growers under contract. The most important production and supply sources are located in Costa Rica, Guatemala, Colombia, and Ecuador.

Fresh Del Monte Produce has 23 distribution centers in North America, including several in Florida, which provide a variety of services, including ripening, sorting, repacking, fresh cut processing, and delivery. The company imports its products through four ports: one on the East Coast (Gloucester in New Jersey), two on the Gulf Coast (Galveston and Manatee), and one on the Pacific Coast (Hueneme, in California).

•  World Direct Shipping. World Direct Shipping, a comparative newcomer to Port Manatee, operates its own container ship to provide direct weekly sea transport between Coatzacoalcos, Mexico and the Port. The company moves cargo from and to markets in Central and Southern Mexico, including Mexico City; its reach in the U.S. extends up the east coast as well as into the Midwest. Cargos carried include perishables, diverse container loads, and oversized products. The company's vessel can handle 300 40-foot containers, 200 of which can be refrigerated, although company executives have stated plans to replace this vessel in early 2016 with a containership with a capacity of about 400 TEUs (20-foot equivalent container units). They also expect to develop a return market for frozen and fresh poultry, pork, and beef.

•  Citrosuco North America, Inc. Established in 1963, Citrosuco is one of the world's leading orange juice producers and shippers from Brazil. The company operates a fleet of four specialized tanker vessels that call at Port Manatee with concentrate and not-from-concentrate juice. Citrosuco North America is the company's North American sales and operating entity, importing and exporting juice products. The company has three plants in Brazil and one in Lake Wales. Ready-to-drink, not-from-concentrate orange juice is currently produced both in Brazil and in Lake Wales.

•  Kinder Morgan Bulk Terminals, Inc. Kinder Morgan, which moves phosphate product through Port Manatee, is one of the largest energy transportation, storage, and distribution companies in North America. It owns an interest in or operates approximately 43,000 miles of pipelines that transport primarily natural gas, crude oil, petroleum products, and CO ; operates more than 150 terminals that store, transfer, and handle products like gasoline and coal; and provides natural gas distribution service to over 1.1 million customers. Besides its dry bulk terminal at Port Manatee, the company has several other terminals in Florida (Port Tampa Bay and Port of Fernandina) and one in Virginia. In addition, it has liquid bulk facilities, including product pipelines, in Ocala and Orlando as well as in Brunswick, Georgia.

•  American Cement Company. In 2006, through a partnership of CRH's Oldcastle Materials, Inc. and Trap Rock Industries, Inc., American Cement Company, LLC, was formed. The company has a state-of-the-art cement facility at Sumterville, in central Florida, designed to produce 1.2 million short tons of cement per year to meet the needs of the Florida market, Product is stored at Port Manatee for delivery to domestic customers in the region.

•  Vulcan Materials Company. Headquartered in Birmingham, Alabama, Vulcan Materials is the nation's largest producer of construction aggregates—primarily crushed stone, sand, and gravel. The company entered into a long-term lease with Port Manatee in 2000, subsequently building a construction aggregate distribution facility at the Port. In January 2014, however, Vulcan, which had acquired Florida Rock in 2007, sold off the former Florida Rock cement facilities to Colombia-based Cementos Argos, keeping all the aggregate facilities in Florida and entering into a long-term aggregate supply agreement with Argos. The sale included the cement terminals and grinding facilities at Port Manatee.

•  TransMontaigne Product Services, Inc. TransMontaigne, (formerly Coastal Fuels and before that, Belcher Oil Company, one of the Port's oldest terminal operators) is part of the TransMontaigne Partners, L.P., family of companies, headquartered in Denver, Colorado. TransMontaigne Partners L.P., a refined petroleum products terminal and pipeline entity, owns terminal facilities at Port Tampa Bay, Port Manatee, Fisher Island (Miami), Port Everglades, Port Canaveral, and Jaxport. In addition to the Florida facilities, the company operates in Southwest Missouri and Northwest Arkansas.

TransMontaigne provides integrated terminal, storage, pipeline, and related services for companies distributing and marketing refined petroleum products and crude oil. Commodities handled include light refined products such as gasoline, distillates (including heating oil), and jet fuels; heavy refined products such as residual fuel oils and asphalt; crude oil; and ethanol. In addition to serving regional gasoline stations through its Port Manatee facility, TransMontaigne, which once provided bunkering services for other Port tenants, may again do so in the future.

•  Martin Marietta. A leading supplier of aggregates and heavy building materials, with operations spanning 32 states, Canada, and the Caribbean, Martin Marietta has leased property at Port Manatee since 2010, building a 20-acre aggregate facility to supply the construction industry.

•  Federal Marine Terminals, FMT, which provides stevedoring operations at the Port, has been handling cargos in the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River and along the East and Gulf coasts since 1960. In addition to its facilities at Port Manatee, FMT serves ports in Indiana, Wisconsin, Ohio, Maine, New York, and North Carolina as well as in Canada. Commodities handled range from steel and machinery to forest products and containers. FMT provides the stevedoring operations for Gearbulk. Port Manatee Forestry Terminals (Arrow Terminals) warehouses lumber requiring covered storage for FMT.

•  Gearbulk, Inc. Gearbulk is an international shipping company, which is owned 60 percent by the Norwegian Kristian Gerhard Jebsen family and 40 percent by Mitsui O.S.K. Lines and provides transportation services for various industrial sectors. The company operates the world's largest fleet of open-hatch gantry-craned vessels, specifically designed and equipped to transport unitized cargos such as forest products and non-ferrous metals. Gearbulk is also involved in the transport of conventional bulk cargos and in terminal operations. It has terminals in Belgium, Argentina, the Netherlands, Taiwan, Malaysia, China, and Brazil. At Port Manatee, Gearbulk provides service for the import of lumber, plywood, aluminum, steel, wood pulp, and wrapped finished lumber. Gearbulk established Arrow Terminals Inc., USA in 2001 to handle growing volumes of forest products moving from South America to the U.S. through Port Manatee.

•  Port Manatee Ship Repair and Fabrication LLC. Manatee Ship Repair and Fabrication, a newcomer to Port Manatee, but a company with over 80 years of vessel repair and fabrication experience, provides diverse services to vessels trading in the Gulf of Mexico and Western Caribbean. Among the vessel repair and fabrication services the company provides are topside ship repairs, ballast water treatment systems, structural fabrication, and pipe fabrication and repairs.

•  Port Manatee Scrap Metal. The Port Manatee Scrap Metal facility, opened in 2012 and located less than 2 miles from the Port's berths, exports scrap metal to Mexico. The facility features a state-of-the-industry shredder system.

•  Gulf Coast Bulk Equipment. A Palmetto-based stevedoring and marine terminal operations firm, Gulf Coast Bulk Equipment has been a Port Manatee tenant since 2008, handling fertilizers, salt, potash and other bulk cargos. Under an agreement signed in June 2015, Gulf Coast Bulk Equipment, Inc. will be utilizing a newly constructed 2-acre cargo pad to support storage of prilled sulphur, a solid, spherically shaped commodity used in the manufacture of fertilizers, plant protection products, and sulfuric acid as well as in the steel industry.

In addition to the tenants providing diverse maritime services, Port Manatee also serves two significant energy providers: Florida Power & Light (FPL) and Gulfstream Natural Gas Systems, LLC. The synergies between these two companies have helped expand the region's power generation capacity. FP&L has been able to add natural gas as a fuel at its existing oil-fired units thanks to the Gulfstream pipeline, which traverses the Gulf of Mexico from Mobile, Alabama, and enters Florida via Port Manatee.

Another of the Port's energy-related users is Vecenergy, which owns 240 acres adjacent to the Port, south of the FPL tanks. In a two-phase operation, Vecenergy plans initially to install 13 250,000-barrel tanks to house diverse petroleum products, followed by an expansion to 24 tanks. Vecenergy, a division of the Vecellio Group, provides services and products to an international customer base in established and emerging markets around the world.

In Florida, for example, Vecenergy operates a liquid asphalt terminal at the Port of Palm Beach and provides fuel additive services to major oil companies offloading petroleum products at many ports, including Port Everglades. Through a partnership with BIDA, a leading European biodiesel technology firm, Vecenergy also has entered the biodiesel production industry

Just outside of the Port boundaries, on U.S. 41, the Port Manatee Commerce Center (aka Federal Port Corporation) has 23 acres with 360,000 square feet of warehouse and office space as well as a rail siding. The company provides convenient storage for products that do not need to take up valuable waterside acreage on the Port.

The property across U.S. 41 from the Port's north entrance, once owned by HRK Holdings, LLC, is used to store shipments of salt and salt products destined for the water treatment and agriculture industries. It has also been used to store dredge material from the Port's Berth 12 expansion. It is expected that other users will be attracted to and accommodated on this property, with its proximity to the Port.

Air Products and Chemicals. In January 2014, Pennsylvania-based Air Products opened a $56.8 million, 300,000-square-foot, liquefied natural gas (LNG) heat exchanger manufacturing plant on a 32-acre site in the PDEZ, across from the south entrance to Port Manatee. Air Products is a world leader in clean energy technology. Their LNG technology and equipment compress and liquefy natural gas for consumer and industrial energy use. Once liquefied, the gas can be transported from global locations and re-gasified for energy use. So far Air Products has hired about 50 people at its PDEZ site, but as many as 250 employees are expected over four years as the first exchangers, cylinders that typically have a 15-foot diameter, stretch about 180 feet long, and weigh up to 500 tons, are manufactured for export through the Port. Eventually even larger capacity versions may be manufactured at this site.