COLOMBO, March 11 (Xinhua) -- Sri Lanka's Colombo Port handled 5.734 million containers in 2016, up 10.6 percent from a year earlier, helped by a Chinese built deep-water terminal, a local media report said Saturday.
The Sri Lanka Ports Authority (SLPA) said Colombo rose to the 23rd among top container ports in 2016, up from the 26th ranking, by Alphaliner, a shipping industry information service.
The report by EconomyNext said the Colombo International Container Terminals (CICT), a unit of the China Merchants Ports, handled 2.0 million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs) in 2016, up from 1.56 million a year earlier.
The SLPA has two terminals which cannot handle large ships. Another private terminal, South Asia Gateway Terminals, makes up the balance units. Industry Sources said the deep-water terminal CICT is expected reach its capacity of 3.2 million TEUS by 2019.
It said transshipment volumes grew 11.8 percent and domestic container volumes rose 6.7 percent to 81,879 TEUs.
The Colombo Port is one of the few large ports to record double digit growth in container volumes.
Overall tonnage handled by the port rose 11.1 percent to 81,878 million tonnes in 2016 from 73,717 million tonnes in 2015.
Automobile transshipment at Hambantota and Colombo rose 29.8 percent to 150,921 units.
