Two of SA’s busiest ports, Durban and Cape Town, have been ranked in the bottom 10 of the worst-performing ports in the world, with the latter ranked the lowest of the 405 surveyed by the World Bank.
The World Bank’s container port performance index assesses efficiency, focusing on the duration of port stay for container vessels. The results show that SA’s ports were all rooted at the bottom measured by their 2023 performance.
The Durban port is at 398, while the Ngqura (Coega) port is ranked 404, underlining the challenges facing Transnet in improving the performance of the ports. The Gqeberha port ranks at 390.
“Port performance is also a key consideration for container shipping lines that operate liner services on fixed schedules, based on agreed pro forma berth windows.
“Delays at any of the scheduled ports of call ... have to be made good before the vessel arrives at the next port of call, to avoid an adverse impact on the efficient operations of the service,” reads the World Bank index.
“As such, port efficiency and port turnaround time at all the ports of call are important subjects for operators, and monitoring port performance has become an increasingly important undertaking in the competitive landscape.”
Globally, each port arrival decreased by 1.8 hours, on average, with the largest increase in average arrival time witnessed in the US and Canada, with an average increase in time of 19.1 hours over all vessel sizes.
By contrast, Sub-Saharan Africa showed an average two-hour improvement in arrival time across all vessel sizes. Improvements in East Asia and Southeast Asia were also recorded.
However, the index shows global improvements were slightly offset by increased average arrival time in Cape Town, San Pedro, Abidjan and Mombasa.
Shipping major Maersk this year said congestion at the Durban port had decreased. However, Maersk, which carries much of SA’s imports and exports, said little headway is being made at the Port of Cape Town.
China’s Yangshan port was ranked the world’s best performer, followed by Oman’s Port of Salalah.
Business Day has over the past year written extensively about the headwinds facing the Port of Cape Town. And congestion at the Durban port came to a head in the last months of 2023, with ships waiting two weeks to dock and 70,000 shipping containers stranded off the city.
The World Bank’s latest index shows the Cape Town port is regressing further in its performance. In the 2022 index, Cape Town ranked 344 out of the 348 ports surveyed and was in the top 20 that most increased average arrival times.
Nearly 60 new ports were surveyed this time around.
The port benchmarking report by the Ports Regulator of SA shows that of all SA terminals, ships spent the most time waiting at anchorage to enter the Cape Town port.
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