Port Qasim

Port Qasim is younger than Karachi Port by nearly a century and was built for a different reason. Port Qasim Authority was created by an act of parliament on 29 June 1973, and the port began operating in 1980 with a dedicated iron ore and coal berth serving Pakistan Steel Mills. That origin still shapes it. Port Qasim was conceived as industrial infrastructure attached to a heavy-industry complex rather than as a general commercial harbour, and the land holding reflects it: the port sits within a much larger estate, with the port area itself accompanied by an industrial zone running to several thousand acres, the largest such zone in Pakistan. Roughly 80 percent of Pakistan's automotive assembly capacity sits at Bin Qasim, alongside the steel mills, power generation and fertiliser plants. Cargo arriving here frequently has its consignee within walking distance of the berth, which is a materially different logistics profile from Karachi Port's.

Access is the port's defining physical constraint. Port Qasim is reached along a navigation channel through Phitti Creek roughly 45 kilometres long, dredged and maintained rather than naturally deep, and historically rated for vessels up to around 75,000 deadweight tonnes. The port lists eighteen berths, the large majority of them operated by private-sector concessionaires rather than by the Authority, with a combined annual handling capacity the Authority puts near 89 million tonnes. The commodity mix is genuinely broad: coal, crude and refined oils, edible oil, LNG, cement, rice and wheat, fertiliser, general cargo and containers all move through separate dedicated facilities. Qasim International Container Terminal handles the container trade, and a second container terminal was contracted with QICT on a build-operate-transfer basis under an implementation agreement signed on 17 August 2006, at an estimated cost of around $211 million, with commercial operation beginning in January 2011. Cargo for the July-to-March period of FY2025-26 came to 36.5 million tonnes, up 8.2 percent year on year, achieved across 1,161 vessel calls, marginally fewer than the year before. Bigger ships carrying more cargo, not more ships, is the pattern in the recent data.

That pattern is exactly what makes channel depth the Authority's central problem. PQA has government approval for a deepening programme to give the navigation channel an all-weather 14-metre draught, costed at around $200 million and structured on a design, construct and finance basis, with berth and storage expansion alongside it. Until that is delivered, the draught ceiling and the length of the transit remain limits that no amount of berth-side efficiency can offset. Port Qasim also became a co-beneficiary of the August 2026 unified transshipment incentive package, in which the Ministry of Maritime Affairs, both port authorities and their terminal operators jointly offered reductions in wharfage, storage and handling charges to attract regional transshipment cargo. QICT's contribution to that package is tiered: terminal handling charge concessions rising from 10 percent to as much as 25 percent depending on what share of a vessel's manifest is transshipment cargo. Coordinating incentives across both Pakistani port authorities rather than letting them undercut each other is a deliberate policy reversal. Maalbardaar clears and forwards cargo through Port Qasim's container and non-container terminals alike.