Why Is the Port of Cape Town Ranked Last in the World?

The Short Answer

In mid-June, the World Bank and S&P Global Market Intelligence published the latest Container Port Performance Index, the annual benchmark that ranks the world's container ports by how long ships spend in them. For the second year in succession, the Port of Cape Town finished four hundredth out of four hundred. There is no lower place to come.

That is the headline most outlets ran, and it is accurate. But it sits beside a second set of figures that complicate it. By Transnet's own measurements, the average ship turnaround time at Cape Town has fallen from 103 hours to the high fifties in three years, and container volume has grown. The port is getting faster and handling more, and still finishing last.

The Index and the Number

The Container Port Performance Index has been published every year since 2021. It measures one thing: the total time a ship spends in port, from arrival at the anchorage to departure from the berth. It is deliberately blunt. It makes no adjustment for weather, for geography, for the size of the vessels calling, or for the reasons a ship might be waiting. From a shipping line's accounts, a day lost to wind and a day lost to a broken crane cost exactly the same, so the index counts them the same.

On that measure, all four of South Africa's container ports sit in the bottom band of roughly 400. Cape Town is last at 400th. Durban is 398th, Ngqura at Coega is 380th, and Port Elizabeth is 314th. Placing them on the scale together is the clearest way to see both the problem and the thing most coverage missed.

Improving, and Still Last

Here is the part that does not fit the headline. According to Transnet National Ports Authority, the average ship turnaround time at Cape Town has been falling steadily: 103 hours in 2023/24, 83 hours the next year, 74 hours in 2025/26, and roughly 58 hours so far in the current financial year. Over the same period, container volume through the terminal rose by about fifteen per cent. By the port's own numbers, it is doing more, faster, every year.

The Windfall Sailing Past

Before the question of why Cape Town is slow, it is worth seeing what its slowness costs, because the largest numbers in this story are not on the quay at all. They are just offshore. Since late 2023, attacks in the Red Sea have pushed most of the world's Asia-to-Europe container traffic off its usual path through the Suez Canal and around the Cape of Good Hope. The detour adds ten to fourteen days and several thousand nautical miles. By early 2026, with the Suez route still carrying a fraction of its former traffic, the Cape route has hardened from an emergency workaround into the default.

And here is the twist that makes this the article's sharpest point. The ships are passing, but they are not stopping. Analysis by the Institute for Security Studies in 2026 found no obvious surge in vessel arrivals at Durban or Cape Town despite the rerouting: almost all the diverted traffic transits the coast rather than calling at it. The bunkering and servicing windfall that the Cape route created has gone largely to rivals, with Namibia's Walvis Bay and Mauritius's Port Louis expanding their fuel operations because they offer more predictable turnaround than South Africa. Port Louis's bunker demand doubled to around a million tonnes in a single year.

What Actually Goes Wrong

So why is Cape Town slow enough to make the world's ships sail past it? The lost ground is in the part of a vessel's visit that is not the berth. In 2025, a ship calling at Cape Town spent only about fifty-six per cent of its time in port alongside the quay being worked. The other forty-four per cent was lost to waiting at anchor and other non-productive delay. A turnaround number can fall while that split stays poor, and it is the split the index punishes.

The Crane-Rate Floor

The clearest fixable problem is raw handling speed. Port productivity is measured in gross crane moves per hour, the number of containers a quay crane lifts on and off in an hour of work. The global working standard sits between 25 and 30. Cape Town's container terminal has been running below 20, and below its own target since late last year. Part of it is equipment: the terminal has been working through a long backlog of ageing cranes whose reliability has not matched a modern operation.

Who Runs It, and Who Calls

Two different sets of companies decide how Cape Town performs: the operator that runs the quay, and the shipping lines that choose whether and how often to call. Both matter, and the operator question is where South African port reform is now moving fastest, though not yet in Cape Town.

The Lines That Call

Cape Town is a regular call for the world's largest container carriers. The global trade is now dominated by three groups, and all three serve South Africa, alongside the next tier of European and Asian lines.

These are not abstract names on the quay. CMA CGM alone runs several weekly South African loops, with names like SHAKA, ASAF and MIDAS, linking Durban, Cape Town, Port Elizabeth and Coega to Asia, the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, the Mediterranean and the Americas. When the terminal slows, it is these carriers' schedules that absorb the delay, and their pricing that quietly passes the cost back to the South African exporter who booked the slot.

Durban Proves the Point

The most useful comparison is not Cape Town against Singapore. It is Cape Town against the other South African ports, which share its labour rules, its currency, its hinterland constraints and much of its equipment history. Three of them are moving up the table. One is not. And the clearest case of all is Durban, because we know exactly what changed.

The Methodology Fight

Transnet, the Southern African Association of Freight Forwarders, the Cape Chamber and others have all objected to the ranking, and parts of their case are fair. The index counts total time in port without asking why a ship waited. Cape Town genuinely loses days to wind and swell that a port in a sheltered basin never would, and that is not a management failure. Transnet has gone further in the past, describing an earlier edition as marred by factual errors.

The objection is reasonable and beside the point at the same time. The index is not trying to apportion blame or to certify good intentions. It is telling shipping lines, accurately, that a container moving through Cape Town will on average sit longer than a box moving through almost anywhere else on the list. That is the number a carrier prices into a sailing, regardless of whether the cause is a gale or a gearbox.

The Western Cape Bill

A port ranking is an abstraction until you trace where the cost lands, and in Cape Town's case the answer is unusually concentrated. The Western Cape grows the country's deciduous fruit, and about eighty per cent of South Africa's deciduous fruit exports, apples, pears, table grapes and stone fruit, leave through Cape Town. The port also handles roughly a quarter of national citrus exports. This is perishable, time-sensitive, foreign-currency-earning cargo, the kind least able to absorb a slow port.

The 2025/26 season made the link explicit. Industry bodies estimate that logistics inefficiencies cost table grape producers about R3.2 billion and stone fruit growers about R1.05 billion in lost revenue and added cost over the season. Apple and pear exporters had already put their losses from the 2024 disruption at around R1 billion.

Where does all this fruit actually go? Cape Town's quay is the last domestic step in a chain that reaches mostly to Europe, with fast-growing demand in Asia and the Gulf. The destination mix is worth seeing, because it shows how much foreign-currency earning depends on this one harbour working.

Behind the numbers are jobs. The fruit sector supports roughly 320,000 of them, about a third of all agricultural employment and around two per cent of total employment in the country. A port that adds cost and uncertainty to every consignment does not just dent a season's margins; it weakens the case for planting the next orchard. The Western Cape has set itself a target of trebling exports by 2035, and has been explicit that the target depends on the port working.

From Quay to Exchange Rate

This is where a local operations story joins the larger one this site has tracked through the rand and the country's credit rating. The mechanism is not exotic. Exports are a credit on the current account; a port that suppresses export volume and inflates export cost is a small, persistent drag on the goods trade balance. No single delayed grape cargo moves the exchange rate, but friction of this kind, sustained across seasons and commodities, is exactly the sort of structural constraint that shows up not in a day's price action but in the trend rate of growth a country can sustain.

There is a second signal that ratings agencies read directly. Transnet is a state-owned enterprise, and the health of the state-owned enterprises is one of the standing questions in any assessment of South African sovereign risk. A port stuck at the bottom of a global index is a visible proxy for that question, regardless of the genuine progress in its turnaround figures. The funding of Transnet's multi-year capital programme, and whether operational reform keeps pace with it, sits on the same ledger as the fiscal and growth assumptions behind the rating. The Durban concession is, in that sense, exactly the kind of reform signal the agencies want to see; the absence of an equivalent at Cape Town is the kind they notice.

Where It Stands in 2026

None of this means the improvement is fictional. The investment is concrete: 28 new rubber-tyred gantry cranes fitted with anti-sway technology rated to work in winds of up to 90 kilometres an hour, plus new ship-to-shore cranes, with deliveries running through 2026; the predictive wind model; the shore tension units; a public-private partnership with the provincial government renewed for another season; and upgrades to truck staging and bunkering on the landside. Turnaround times have genuinely fallen. Volumes have genuinely risen.