Chittagong Port: The Gateway of Bangladesh's Trade

Almost everything Bangladesh sells to the world, and most of what it buys, passes through a single river port. Chittagong Port, on the banks of the Karnaphuli in Chittagong, handles about 92 per cent of the country's traded goods and 98 per cent of its containerised trade, according to the International Finance Corporation — a concentration with few parallels among trading nations of Bangladesh's size. The port is at once the economy's greatest asset and its most consequential bottleneck. When Chittagong slows, garment factories miss their shipment windows, the price of imported raw materials moves in Dhaka's markets within days, and ships queue from the Karnaphuli estuary to the Kutubdia channel. This profile sets out how the port grew, how it operates today, and the three expansion projects — Laldia, the Bay Terminal and the deep-sea port at Matarbari — on which its next half-century depends.

From river harbour to national gateway

Ships have loaded at the Karnaphuli's mouth for as long as records reach; early Arab traders knew the anchorage as Shetgang, and the harbour traded with Arabia, China and later Portugal centuries before it had a jetty. Its modern institutional history, however, is usually dated to the Port Commissioners Act of 1887, under which appointed commissioners took charge of the port — the Chittagong Port Authority still observes 25 April as Port Day. For its first six decades the port served the jute, tea and coastal trades of eastern Bengal. Partition changed its role overnight: in 1947 Chittagong became the principal seaport of East Pakistan, and traffic quickly outgrew an administration split between the Port Commissioners and the Port Railway. The two were merged into the Chittagong Port Trust in July 1960. After independence the trust model was judged too slow for a port carrying a new nation's trade, and in 1976 an ordinance abolished it and created the Chittagong Port Authority, the state body that still runs the port today, now under the Chittagong Port Authority Act of 2022. The container era arrived the following year: the port handled its first containers in 1977, beginning a shift from break-bulk cargo to boxes that would define everything that followed.

The scale of the gateway

The numbers describe a port that sets a new record almost every year and strains against its limits in the same year. In the 2024–25 fiscal year the port handled a record 3,296,067 TEUs of containers, up 4 per cent on the year before, together with 130.7 million tonnes of cargo and 4,077 ship calls, the port authority reported; the adjoining Chittagong Custom House collected Tk 75,432 crore in revenue, the largest take of any customs station in the country. Growth continued in 2025–26, when container throughput reached about 3.52 million TEUs, up roughly 6.8 per cent. Lloyd's List ranked Chittagong 67th among the world's hundred busiest container ports in 2024 — respectable company for a tidal river port — and the port authority has set itself a target of five million TEUs by 2030. Behind the headline figures sits a simple structural fact: the second port, Mongla, handles only a small remainder of the country's container trade, so close to all of Bangladesh's box traffic — commonly put at 98 to 99 per cent — moves across Chittagong's quays, through its four container terminals and the inland depots counted in its totals.

The terminals and their operators

The old general cargo jetties along the city waterfront still handle bulk and break-bulk cargo, much of it lightered from mother vessels anchored offshore, but the port's centre of gravity is its container terminals — and 2026 is the year their operating map was redrawn. The New Mooring Container Terminal (NCT), built in 2007 with five jetties and fourteen of the port's eighteen ship-to-shore gantry cranes, is the largest of them, handling about 1.39 million TEUs in 2025–26. On 8 October 2026 the port authority signed a fifteen-year concession with the Dubai-based operator DP World to run and modernise NCT and its overflow yard: DP World paid an upfront sum of about US$50 million, committed a further US$150 million to modernisation, and the authority and the government are to retain roughly 40 to 67 per cent of the revenue from each container handled, while ownership of the land and assets stays with the port authority. The shipping minister told reporters the deal was structured to protect Bangladesh's interests; The Daily Star noted it was signed after a lengthy process marked by controversy and opposition. Handover of operations is targeted for March 2027, with capacity at the terminal expected to rise from about 1.23 million TEUs to between 1.6 and 1.8 million.

Next door, the Chittagong Container Terminal (CCT), with a quay of about 450 metres, faces a change of its own: the authority has decided not to renew the operating contract of the local firm Saif Powertec when it expires on 2 November 2026, and the Shipping Ministry has directed the authority to process the appointment of Saudi Arabia's Red Sea Gateway Terminal (RSGT) in its place, though no final arrangement had been announced as of November 2026. RSGT is already inside the port. Since June 2024 its Bangladeshi subsidiary has run the Patenga Container Terminal, near the river's mouth, under a twenty-two-year concession — the first time a foreign company has operated a terminal in Bangladesh. RSGT invested about US$170 million in Patenga's 600 metres of quay; the terminal handled 154,564 TEUs in 2025, below its design capacity, and its full-scale operations were inaugurated in July 2026, with the operator reporting berth capacity raised towards 600,000 TEUs a year.

A river port's limits

For all the records, Chittagong remains what geography made it: a river port on a silting, tidal channel. Port guidelines cap entry at a draft of 9.5 metres and a length of 190 metres by day — 170 metres at night — and the permissible draft for the river passage is put at 9.14 metres, with less water alongside the older jetties. In practice, as APM Terminals has pointed out, ships of only about 2,800 TEUs can berth directly; larger container ships stay away, and most mainline cargo reaches Bangladesh on feeder vessels transshipped through Colombo, Singapore or Port Klang. Bulk carriers too large for the river discharge part of their cargo into lighter vessels at the outer anchorage — the same estuary now crossed near its mouth by the Karnaphuli Tunnel — which makes the port hostage to the lighter fleet. In January 2026 that dependence failed publicly: 108 cargo ships were waiting at the outer anchorage and the Kutubdia channel in mid-January, more than 85 of them bulk carriers holding some four million tonnes of grain, fertiliser and raw materials, because lighters were unavailable. Berth operators blamed allocation and mismanagement, and accused some importers of using lighters as floating warehouses; the water transport coordination cell blamed dense fog and fertiliser-programme demand.

The performance data explain why the business community's complaints are persistent. The port ranked 364th of 400 ports in the 2025 Container Port Performance Index, and the customs Time Release Study of 2022 measured an average release time of eleven days and six hours for cargo. Congestion trackers still flag the port in its bad weeks: the Tradlinx index rated Chittagong "congested" in late October 2026, with average berthing delays of about forty hours. Port officials respond that yards fill because importers collect their boxes too slowly; shipping agents reply that a gateway carrying 92 per cent of a nation's trade cannot run at the edge of its yard capacity. Both claims recur because both describe the same arithmetic — volume growing at five to seven per cent a year against a fixed river.

The river link to Dhaka

One relief valve was built a decade ago and is only now being opened. The Pangaon Inland Container Terminal, at Keraniganj on the Buriganga River about fifteen kilometres from central Dhaka, was inaugurated in 2013 as the country's first river container terminal, built by the port authority for a design capacity of 116,000 TEUs a year, so that boxes could move between Chittagong and the capital by water instead of clogging the highway. For years it barely functioned: it handled about 30,000 TEUs in 2023, and by 2024 utilisation had fallen to around five per cent, a failure traders attributed to high river freight charges and slow customs clearance. The modal split tells the story — roughly 94 per cent of Dhaka–Chittagong containers move by road, about four per cent by rail and only about one per cent by water. In November 2025 the authority handed Pangaon to Medlog, the logistics arm of the Mediterranean Shipping Company, on a twenty-two-year term; Medlog took over in February 2026, monthly handling had risen to about 900 TEUs by the middle of the year, and in September 2026 the authority invited private firms to develop the terminal's remaining twenty-two acres.

Building the next gateway

The expansion programme now under way is, in effect, an attempt to move the gateway out of the river and into the sea. At Laldia Char, near the Karnaphuli's mouth, Denmark's APM Terminals broke ground in August 2026 on a US$550 million terminal it will design, finance, build and operate with the port authority and local partner QNS Container Services, under a thirty-year concession signed in November 2025 — the first fully foreign-financed terminal project of its kind in Bangladesh. Set on about forty-nine acres with a deeper approach, Laldia is designed for ships of up to 6,000 TEUs, more than double what the river jetties can take, and for over 800,000 TEUs a year; APM Terminals expects it operational by 2030, though the shipping minister said in August 2026 that he expected operations in 2029.

The larger prize lies a few kilometres up the coast. The Bay Terminal, to be built behind a six-kilometre breakwater off the Sandwip channel, would add about 3,500 metres of berths — a multipurpose terminal and two container terminals — for Panamax-size ships, and about three million TEUs a year of capacity. The marine infrastructure project, costing Tk 13,525 crore, was approved in April 2025 with a US$650 million World Bank loan for the breakwater and access channel; the breakwater's design simulations were completed in September 2026 and the authority was preparing to tender the construction contract, with the terminals themselves to follow under public-private partnerships in which PSA Singapore and DP World have been named by the government. The port authority's chairman expects the Bay Terminal in operation in 2031.

The third project is not an extension of Chittagong at all but its eventual successor for the largest ships. At Matarbari, on the Moheshkhali coast in Cox's Bazar, the port authority is building Bangladesh's first deep-sea port with Japanese financing: main construction began in May 2026, about thirty per cent of the physical work was done by late October, and the first phase — a 460-metre container jetty and a 300-metre multipurpose jetty, behind a channel dredged to eighteen metres — is meant to receive ships of up to 8,000 TEUs that no Bangladeshi port can take today. The authority targets the start of operations by December 2029, with full commercial operations expected in 2030; the coal jetty built for the neighbouring power plant already works, informally, like a small port.

Chittagong's predicament is unusual: it is not a port looking for trade, but trade looking for a port. Every element of the current programme — foreign operators at Patenga, New Mooring and Laldia, a breakwater harbour at the Bay Terminal, a deep-sea port at Matarbari — is an attempt to add water deep enough and quay long enough for the commerce that already exists. Until those projects deliver, the world's sixty-seventh busiest container port will keep doing its work the way it has since 1887: up a shallow river, against the tide, at the limit of its capacity.