Pakistan’s first deep-water container terminal at the Karachi Port has entered the final phase of infrastructure development to welcome mother vessels by mid-April this year, say officials.
Despite the significance attached to this terminal, sources say the KPT has been delaying their part of the project, which may not bode well with the investors who have a positive outlook of Pakistan’s ports – they are targeting to manage 20,000 TEU ships to serve as hub terminal for mother ships coming to Pakistan.
Spread over 85 hectares, the terminal is designed to accommodate Super Post Panamax ships: large vessels having a capacity of up to 20,000 Twenty-Foot Equivalent Units (TEUs), an industry standard to measure a ship’s cargo carrying capacity. Placed on the mouth of Karachi Harbor, it has a depth of 16 meters and provides the most convenient access to mother ships entering Karachi.
The project is a joint venture of Karachi Port Trust (KPT) and Hutchinson Port Holdings Limited (HPH), the Hong Kong-based parent of SAPT.
According to industry sources, SAPT has a lot of significance when it comes to meeting the growing shipping needs of Pakistan. This can be an early harvest project from China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) point of view because Gawadar Port, which lacks supporting infrastructure – power, storage, roads, railways etc – will take a while to fully develop, they say.
With SAPT, Pakistan will be able to accommodate deep draft container ships and reap economic benefits including reduced costs to the country’s importers and exporters and reduction in transit time for shipments, and employment opportunities. The taxation benefits to the local economy have already started to accrue and are envisioned to grow as the traffic for the terminal grows swiftly in the next couple of years, sources say.
Read more: Inexplicable delays mar development of country’s first deepwater container terminal
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