KGTL

Karachi Gateway Terminal Limited is often described as the company that "replaced PICT," which is accurate about the berths and incomplete about everything else. The concession KGTL signed with Karachi Port Trust on 22 June 2023 runs for fifty years, against the twenty-one years its predecessor held, and it was structured under an intergovernmental arrangement between Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates rather than as an ordinary commercial re-tender. That framing matters: the counterparty is not simply a terminal operator that won a bid, but AD Ports Group, a UAE public-sector entity, holding the majority position in a joint venture with the UAE-based Kaheel Terminals. The commercial terms disclosed at signing were $220 million in concession and growth capital expenditure across the first ten years, with roughly $75 million of that front-loaded into the first two years covering upfront fees, prepayments, superstructure and equipment.

The naming confusion worth resolving first is not KGTL versus PICT but KGTL versus KGTML. Karachi Gateway Terminal Multipurpose (Private) Limited is a separate legal entity with its own concession, signed in February 2024 for a twenty-five-year term rather than fifty, covering berths 11 to 17 and roughly 1,500 metres of quay wall on the same East Wharf. KGTML handles general cargo such as steel, paper and clinker plus clean bulk including grains and fertiliser. It is not a division of the container terminal and does not share its gate, yard or booking systems, even though both sit under the same AD Ports and Kaheel ownership and share a website domain. Cargo addressed to the wrong one of the two is a routing error, not a clerical variation. The berth count itself is genuinely inconsistent across sources, and this is worth stating plainly rather than resolving artificially. AD Ports Group's own concession announcement describes berths 6 to 9; its terminal page describes five berths across an 800-metre quay; other reporting refers to berths 6 to 10. The likeliest explanation is that a fifth berth was folded into the concession footprint after the original PICT arrangement, which covered four berths across 600 metres, but the published figures have never been fully reconciled. The 800-metre quay length is consistent across sources; the numbering is not.

Equipment as listed by AD Ports comprises six ship-to-shore gantry cranes, twenty rubber-tyred gantry cranes running on dual diesel and electric power, eleven reach stackers, a top loader, three empty container handlers, twelve forklifts and bale grabbers, and sixty prime movers. The terminal also claims Pakistan's first onsite rail link at a container facility, a lineage that traces back to the dedicated Karachi-Lahore rail cargo service PICT established with Pakistan Railways. The dredging programme was completed and announced in mid-2026 at a cost of around $60 million, and its headline benefit was reported on the bulk side rather than the container side: vessels of up to 120,000 tonnes can now berth against a previous ceiling near 60,000, with turnaround for a 60,000-tonne bulk carrier falling from something in the region of twelve to fifteen days to roughly three. Container-side capacity is projected to move from 750,000 TEU toward one million, though that figure is a target attached to further equipment investment rather than a completed outcome. KGTL has since signalled a further $75 million to $100 million over five years covering yard expansion, larger cranes, silos with around 8.5 million tonnes of annual clean-bulk capacity, warehousing and automation. One personnel detail explains more about the transition than most corporate summaries do: Khurram Aziz Khan, who was PICT's chief executive until his resignation in October 2023, now leads KGTL. The institutional knowledge did not leave with the concession. Maalbardaar files Goods Declarations and arranges forwarding for cargo discharged at KGTL as part of its ordinary Karachi Port clearing work.