Where Salerno earns, and whether it reaches ten million
Salerno reaches about three fifths of its own return target, and the shortfall is structural rather than a matter of execution.
At the full 200 tonne-per-day build on the pipeline route, the project company earns $8.73M a year after tax. Salerno's 27.5% of that is $2.40M. The 6% joint-venture fee on revenue of $51.94M is $3.12M. An operations and maintenance contract at 4.5% of capital, taken at a 15% contractor margin, is about $0.27M. The total is $5.79M against a US$10M target, or 57.9% of it.
Engineering and construction of the hubs is a further margin, and it is one-off rather than annual, so it does not close a recurring gap.
Two revenue lines the criterion explicitly allows are not computed here, and they are the first place to look before concluding the target is unreachable. The criterion names trading and custody alongside dividends, service fees and engineering. A trading margin on molecules bought free-on-board Thailand and sold delivered Singapore is a real line for a trading house, and this analysis prices the molecule at one number at both ends, so it books none of it. A custody or throughput fee on the collection fleet is the same: the fleet is capitalized inside the project at $7.19M and earns nothing separately. Both are structuring choices rather than new business, and both move value between Salerno and its co-investors rather than creating it, which is why they were left out of a project-level view and why they belong in the structuring work rather than in this verdict.
Three readings.
The gap is structural rather than a matter of execution. Even if the project cleared 13% instead of 16.3%, the increment to Salerno's share would be under a million dollars a year. Reaching $10M requires either a much larger business than the corridor's feedstock supports, or a different contractual position.
The joint-venture fee is already the largest single line, at 60% of Salerno's total. That fee is charged to the project company and reduces its return, so it is a transfer between Salerno and its partners rather than value created. Increasing it makes the project less attractive to the co-investors whose capital the plan depends on.
The mill cooperative structure deserves testing here. Mills contributing gas rights in exchange for equity would satisfy the Thai-majority ownership constraint by construction, lock feedstock without cash, and align the party that can otherwise hold the project to ransom at renewal. It does not by itself close the $10M gap.