Karachi Port

Karachi Port is one of the few pieces of Pakistani infrastructure that predates the country itself. The Karachi Port Trust Act was passed in 1886 and the Trust took over harbour administration on 1 April 1887, succeeding the Karachi Harbour Board that had run the port since 1880. That statute has never been replaced. KPT still operates under it today, and the legal form it created explains an institutional detail that surprises people who assume the port is a government department: KPT exists as a trust governed by a Board of Trustees, legally separate from the federal government, with a chairman appointed by the state serving as chief executive alongside ten trustees. It answers to the Ministry of Maritime Affairs without being a directorate of it. The practical consequence is that KPT sets its own tariffs, signs its own concession agreements, and carries its own balance sheet, which is why terminal concession terms at Karachi are negotiated with the Trust rather than issued by ministry order.

The port's own published position is that it holds a total quay wall of roughly 4,900 metres split across dry-cargo, liquid-cargo and container berths on its East and West Wharves. Individual berth counts and quay allocations move as concessions are re-cut, so the more durable way to describe the port is by wharf: the East Wharf now sits almost entirely under a single concession structure, with AD Ports Group and its UAE partner Kaheel Terminals holding a 50-year container concession over berths 6 to 9, signed in June 2023 and operated as Karachi Gateway Terminal Limited, and a separate 25-year concession over berths 11 to 17 for bulk and general cargo signed in February 2024. Those two agreements together gave one operator group effective control of the East Wharf's berths, a consolidation that drew parliamentary scrutiny in Pakistan at the time. Karachi International Container Terminal and South Asia Pakistan Terminals operate under their own separate arrangements elsewhere in the port. Throughput for the financial year ending 30 June 2026 was reported at 55.44 million tonnes, up about 2.8 percent on the previous year's 53.95 million, with container volumes at roughly 2.75 million TEU.

The most consequential recent work at Karachi has been below the waterline. KPT began a large channel dredging programme in March 2026, structured around its agreement with KGTL, with the Dutch trailing suction hopper dredger Rotterdam arriving on 14 March and four dredgers eventually working the harbour simultaneously, which the Trust described as unprecedented in the port's history. The stated targets are to deepen the upper and lower harbour channels to 14 metres and take fourteen berths to 15.5 metres, sufficient for vessels around 350 metres long and 100,000 gross registered tonnes. KGTL's annual container capacity is expected to rise from 750,000 TEU toward one million as a result, and bulk-vessel capacity at the adjoining general cargo terminal to roughly double. Separately, in August 2026 the Ministry of Maritime Affairs announced a unified transshipment incentive package covering both Karachi Port and Port Qasim, with the two authorities and their terminal operators jointly offering reductions in wharfage, storage, wet charges and terminal handling charges. That policy is aimed squarely at pulling regional transshipment volumes away from Colombo and Jebel Ali, and it is the first time the two Pakistani port authorities have coordinated tariff incentives rather than competing on them. Maalbardaar files customs declarations and arranges freight forwarding for cargo moving through Karachi Port's terminals as part of its normal clearing work.