Gulftainer will be able to absorb up to 90 per cent of the UAE's total container demand if the Strait of Hormuz is blockaded again, chief executive Farid Belbouab said, as the Sharjah company plans to nearly triple capacity at its Khor Fakkan Commercial Terminal.
Mr Belbouab yesterday announced $2 billion of investment across Khor Fakkan and its inland network. The spending covers new berth and yard equipment plus the development of Al Dhaid and Sajaa dry ports.
Capacity at Khor Fakkan port terminal is to increase from 3.5 million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs) to 5 million within three months. Gulftainer plans to then scale in capacity in phases – first to seven million and then to 10 million – over 24 then 36 months.
“We will definitely be able to absorb about 80 per cent to 90 per cent of the total demand,” Mr Belbouab told The National, when asked what share of container cargo Gulftainer could handle in the event of another closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
A TEU is a standard unit of capacity measurement in the maritime and shipping industry, equivalent to the size of a standard shipping container.
Khor Fakkan sits on the UAE's east coast, facing the Gulf of Oman rather than the Arabian Gulf, placing it outside the Strait of Hormuz. Such geography has made Khor Fakkan, along with Fujairah to its south, central to the UAE's efforts to keep cargo moving and reduce dependence on the strait.
The expansion follows a surge in traffic since the strait was reopened after being effectively closed for four months during the Iran war. Weekly container throughput at Khor Fakkan climbed from 8,000 TEUs before the crisis to 65,000 today.
Throughput is the volume of containers moving in and out. During this time, the port converted from a trans-shipment-focused operation, in which cargo is transferred between ships without entering the UAE market, to a full import-export gateway, in which cargo moves through customs and into the country.
The company's near-term target is 100,000 TEUs a week.
Gulftainer is also developing its dry ports at Al Dhaid and Sajaa in Sharjah to handle the surge in volume. In its first phase, Al Dhaid will provide 1.5 million TEUs of capacity, with an initial 500,000 TEUs due within 45 days and the full total within six months.
Combined with Sajaa, the two dry ports will add 2.3 million TEUs of annual inland logistics capacity. Both ports are bonded, which means goods can sit there duty-free until cleared. They also handle more than containers, including open storage, cold storage, warehousing and light manufacturing.
Mr Belbouab was careful to frame the expansion as complementary rather than competitive with the region's larger hubs. Jebel Ali alone handles about 20 million TEUs a year, dwarfing Khor Fakkan even after its planned expansion.
“Our ambition is not to capture 100 per cent,” he said. “It's really about giving that certainty … those networks of ports will work together.” He said Fujairah and Oman's ports have similar growth ambitions, and described the region's operators as “interdependent” in serving the UAE and wider Middle East market.
Mr Belbouab also outlined plans for new shipping services to East Africa and the Red Sea in the coming weeks. He said Gulftainer was positioning itself as a logistics backbone for the India-Middle East Economic Corridor and China's Belt and Road Initiative.
