Michele Labrut | May 10, 2021

The index finds that Asian container ports are the most efficient in the world, dominating the Top 50 spots.

Despite being the highest ranked European port Algeciras in Spain is at position 10 in the index. Colombo in Sri Lanka is the top-ranked port in South Asia at 17th place and Mexico’s Lazaro Cardenas leads the Americas at 25th.

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Canada’s Halifax is the only other North American port in the Top 50. Djibouti, in 61st place, is the top-ranked African port.

“The development of high-quality and efficient container port infrastructure is a key contributor to successful, export-led growth strategies both in developing and developed countries,” said Martin Humphreys, World Bank Lead Transport Economist.

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He added that efficient ports also ensure business continuity and improve the resilience of the maritime gateways as crucial nodes in the global logistical system.

The index, the first of its kind, is a comparison of global container port performance that is intended to identify gaps and opportunities for improvement in container port operations.

The index scored ports against different metrics, making the efficiency ranking comparable around the globe by assessing and standardising for different ship sizes and container moves per call. It is based on total port hours per ship call, defined as the elapsed time between when a ship reaches a port to its departure from the berth having completed its cargo exchange.

The index indicates that key port performance metrics such as minutes per container move show large discrepancies in global port efficiency. While top performers such as Yokohama take just 1.1 minutes on average to load or unload a container in a standard port call, the average for equivalent workloads in African ports is more than three times that at 3.6 minutes.