Sharjah Update Sharjah business & Investment News from Invest in Sharjah (Sharjah FDI Office)
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Sharjah’s east coast Khorfakkan Port has been ranked in the top ten most productive ports in the world, according to the 2014 JOC Port Productivity report. The Journal of Commerce compiled the report based on data gathered about 483 terminals and 771 ports from ocean freight carriers representing more than 75 percent of global capacity.
All ports listed in the top ten by the JOC report were located in Asia or the Middle East. Six of the ports in the top ten list were Chinese, while the UAE’s Jebel Ali Port topped the rankings at number one.
The report calculated unadjusted gross per berth productivity for each port from the actual arrival and departure times from ships at berth. According to JOC’s report, Khorfakkan Container Terminal (KCT) handled 100 container moves per ship, per hour on all ship sizes.
Managed by privately owned terminal operator Gulftainer, KCT is the only fully fledged operational container terminal in the UAE located outside the Strait of Hormuz. Due to its unique geographic location, Khorfakkan is an key transshipment hub for the Arabian Gulf, the Indian Sub-continent, the Gulf of Oman and East African markets.
Gulftainer has recently completed a second phase of expansion, investing in US$60 million (AED 220m) in four state-of-the-art ship to shore (STS) and 12 rubber tyred gantry (RTG) cranes at the Khorfakkan Container Terminal (KCT), strengthening the terminal’s operational capability and bringing the total number of gantry cranes to twenty.
Due to the continued infrastructure investment, KCT was the first terminal operator in the Middle East to handle the CMA CGM Group’s 16,020 TEU (twenty-foot equivalent unit container) capacity Marco Polo container ship. The Marco Polo is approximately the length of standard football pitches (396 metres), has a 54-metre beam and a draft of 16 metres.
Source: JOC, Gulftainer
