Bangladesh’s Chittagong Port has reached a new high in container handling by becoming the 71st busiest among the top 100 container handling ports in the world recently.
The Chittagong Port handles Bangladesh’s majority of exports, especially the readymade garments.
Lloyd’s List, a UK-based journal on port and shipping, placed Chittagong Port in its 2017 edition published recently.
The world’s oldest journal listed top 100 container ports worldwide based primarily on the total throughput of the containers in the year 2016.
As per the list, the Chittagong Port was ranked 76th in 2016, 87th in 2015 and 86th in 2014.
In 2016, the port handled 23,46,909 TUEs (twenty equivalent units) of containers. During this period, Chittagong Port reportedly posted 15.90 per cent annual growth in container handling.
In 2015, Bangladesh’s leading maritime port handled 20, 24, 207 TUEs of containers, while in 2014 the figure stood at 17, 31,279 TUEs.
According to the users of the port and foreign trade experts, increased foreign trade, especially shipment of apparel products to global export destinations, is a major contributor to the feat.
“The volume of annual throughput soared due to economic growth in the country,” said Md Zafar Alam, Member (Admin and Planning) of Chittagong Port Authority.
The country’s leading trade associations, including the BGMEA, are however not content with the existing infrastructure of the port, which they feel is responsible for creating frequent container congestions and thereby hampering trade activities.
The President of BGMEA, Siddiqur Rahman, recently made some recommendations pertaining to the complexities involved in loading-unloading of containers, to ease the congestion and increase efficiencies.
Rahman’s recommendations included increasing the number of key gantry cranes to 26 from the present four, out of which only 2 are only working currently.
