Africa's Busiest Container Ports in 2012 and 2013

The following is an exclusive listing of Africa's busiest container ports. Global rankings (e.g. from Containerisation International Magazine) usually focus on the world's top 100 container ports and thus include less than 5 ports from Africa. As such, there currently does not exist a comprehensive listing of Africa's largest container ports.

Submit any request for clarification in the comment section below or get in touch via Twitter on @afrocompanies

Observations 

• The total number of TEUs managed by Africa's top 36 container ports in 2012 was 25 million. While that number is no doubt huge, it is substantially lower than container traffic at the world's two busiest container ports (Shanghai's 32.53 million TEUs and Singapore's 31.65 million TEUs) and not much more than the next two busiest ports (Hong Kong's 23.12 million TEUs and Shenzen's 22.94 million TEUs).

• The '2012' statistics for Egypt's Sokhna port are from 2008. However, 2012 data is unlikely to be too far from that figure given the sociopolitical unrest that has plagued Egypt since January 2011.

Definition of TEUs 
TEU stands for Twenty-foot Equivalent Unit. It is a standard unit for counting containers of various capacities and for describing the capacities of container ships or container terminals. One 20 Foot ISO container equals 1 TEU. One 40 Foot ISO container equals two TEU.



2012




2013