The Port of Colombo is Sri Lanka’s largest and busiest port, an artificial harbour on the island’s southwest coast in the capital, Colombo, just south of the mouth of the Kelani River and facing the Laccadive Sea arm of the Indian Ocean. In 2024 it handled about 7.78 million TEU (twenty-foot equivalent units), which ranked it 28th among the world’s container ports in Lloyd’s List’s One Hundred Container Ports 2025 and second in South Asia after India’s Mundra. It became a sheltered harbour in 1912, its first container terminals from the early 1980s, and its newest deep-water berths, dredged to 18 m, opened in 2013. It matters because of where it sits, near the southern tip of India on the east–west shipping routes across the Indian Ocean, which has made it a major regional hub for transshipment, where cargo is moved between ocean-going ships and the feeders that serve smaller ports.
7.78 million TEU and 28th place: Colombo on the 2024 Lloyd’s List
The headline number comes from Lloyd’s List, the shipping journal whose annual ranking of the world’s hundred busiest container ports is widely cited. Its 2025 edition, covering 2024 volumes, credits Colombo with about 7.78 million TEU, up from about 6.94 million in 2023, when the port stood 27th. That jump of roughly 12 percent in one year took Colombo past its previous record of about 7.25 million TEU, set in 2021.
The years before that jump were flat rather than falling. Colombo handled about 7.05 million TEU in 2018 and 7.23 million in 2019, dipped to 6.86 million in the pandemic year of 2020, recovered to 7.25 million in 2021, and then slipped back to about 6.86 million in 2022, the year Sri Lanka defaulted on its foreign debt, before edging up to 6.94 million in 2023. Six years within a band of about 400,000 TEU sit close to the capacity of about 7 million TEU that Wikipedia gives for the port, which is why the 2024 figure, above that mark, stands out.
Two regional comparisons put the figure in context. Southeast Asia’s ports are larger: Port Klang in Malaysia handled about 14.6 million TEU in 2024 and Laem Chabang in Thailand about 9.6 million. Within South Asia, its rivals are Indian. Mundra in Gujarat handled about 8.2 million TEU in 2024 and ranked 25th, ahead of Colombo, while Jawaharlal Nehru Port at Nhava Sheva, near Mumbai, handled about 7.05 million. Colombo and Nhava Sheva have traded places before. In early 2009, by the port’s own history, Nhava Sheva’s container throughput overtook Colombo’s, and by 2016 Colombo had passed it again, becoming for a time the largest container port in South Asia; in every year of the Lloyd’s List series since, it has stayed ahead of Nhava Sheva.
A single TEU is one 20-foot container, and most boxes at sea are 40-footers counted as two, so the actual number of containers crossing Colombo’s quays in a year is a little more than half the TEU figure, somewhere between 4.3 and 4.7 million boxes in 2024. Many of them never leave the port. Because Colombo is a transshipment hub, a box arriving from Europe or East Asia on a large ship is lifted off, stacked, and loaded onto a smaller feeder bound for a port that the big ship does not visit, and each of those moves counts toward the total.
From 1 million TEU in 1996: the numbers of Colombo’s container era
1979: a single ports authority
The modern port begins with an act of parliament. The Sri Lanka Ports Authority Act No. 51 of 1979 merged the Colombo Port Commission, the Port (Cargo) Corporation and the Port Tally and Protective Services Corporation into the Sri Lanka Ports Authority (SLPA), which still owns and runs the country’s major ports, from Colombo and Galle to Trincomalee and Hambantota. In the early 1980s the SLPA converted Colombo for containers, with two container berths built by the end of the decade and three more in the early 1990s.
1996–2005: from one million to 2.45 million TEU
Private operators arrived in the late 1990s and the growth figures followed. The main channel was deepened to 15 m, and the port passed one million TEU a year for the first time in 1996. In 1997 an oil berth opened and container traffic reached 1.5 million TEU; a new container terminal opened in 1998, a new container yard followed in 1999, and the South Asia Gateway Terminal (SAGT), operated by John Keells Holdings, began operations at the end of the decade. The multipurpose Ashraff Quay followed in 2002 and the Unity Container Terminal in 2003. By 2004 Colombo handled about 2.2 million TEU, and 2.45 million in 2005.
The three older terminals, the SLPA’s Jaya Container Terminal (JCT), SAGT and Unity, list seven container berths and four feeder berths, 14 quay cranes, 12 super-post-Panamax cranes and two twin-lift super-post-Panamax cranes, four wall-mounted gantries, 78 rubber-tyred gantries and 285 terminal tractors and trailers. Bandaranaike Quay and Prince Vijaya Quay add four rail-mounted cranes and 6,245 m² of bonded warehousing for conventional cargo.
US$1.2 billion, 18 metres and 6,830 metres of breakwater: the Colombo South Harbour
2008–2012: building the south harbour
To take larger ships, in 2008 the SLPA began the Colombo South Harbour expansion, a US$1.2 billion project built by Hyundai Engineering and Construction and completed on 11 April 2012. The design figures: room for four new terminals, each 1,200 m long with three berths; alongside depth of 18 m, capable of being dredged to 23 m; an entrance channel 560 m wide and 20 m deep; an 18 m harbour basin; and a turning circle 600 m across. On paper it raised the port’s annual capacity from about four million TEU to about twelve million and allowed it to receive ships of around 22,000 TEU.
2013: 2.4 million TEU at Colombo International Container Terminals
The first of the new terminals was awarded on 16 September 2010 to a consortium of China Merchants Holdings (International) and Aitken Spence. It is run by Colombo International Container Terminals Ltd (CICT), a joint venture between China Merchants and the SLPA, under a 35-year build-operate-transfer agreement. Construction started in December 2011 and the first phase opened on 8 August 2013, with a design capacity of 2.4 million TEU, 18 m berths and 12 new quay cranes, sheltered by a new breakwater 6,830 m long. The SLPA holds 15 percent stakes in both CICT and SAGT.
US$700 million and 269 hectares: the West Terminal and Port City
The second south-harbour terminal, the Colombo West Container Terminal, was signed in 2021 as a US$700 million, 35-year build-operate-transfer deal between India’s Adani Ports and SEZ, the Sri Lankan conglomerate John Keells Holdings and the SLPA. In 2023 the US International Development Finance Corporation committed US$553 million to the Adani-led project, which was scheduled to begin operating in 2025. Immediately south of the new harbour, between its southern edge and the Fort lighthouse, 269 ha of sea was reclaimed for Port City Colombo, a special economic zone next to Galle Face Green. Reclamation was completed by January 2019, the total cost was put at US$15 billion in 2017, and in May 2021 parliament passed the Port City Commission Bill, which allows tax exemptions for up to 40 years.
1505, 1656, 1912: the dates behind the older harbour
Colombo’s anchorage was known to Roman, Arab and Chinese traders more than 2,000 years ago, and by the 8th century Arab Muslim merchants had settled here; their descendants form Sri Lanka’s Moor community. The Portuguese arrived in 1505, won the right to trade cinnamon from Parakramabahu VIII of Kotte, and began building a fort in 1517; that district is still called Fort. In 1638 the Dutch signed a treaty with Rajasinghe II of Kandy, and in 1656 they took Colombo after a siege that left only 93 Portuguese survivors. The port was then the capital of the Dutch East India Company’s maritime provinces until the British took it in 1796. After the Kandyan surrender of 1815 brought the whole island under British rule, Colombo became the capital of the crown colony of Ceylon, and the British chose to build houses and civic buildings around the harbour rather than keep it as a garrison. A municipal council was created in 1865 and met for the first time in 1866.
The engineering that makes the modern port possible came under British rule. Colombo is one of the largest artificial harbours in the world: in 1912 its open roadstead was converted into a sheltered harbour, and in 1913 the Colombo Port Commission was set up to run it. After independence in 1948 the numbers kept climbing: Queen Elizabeth Quay opened in 1954, 16 alongside berths with transit sheds and warehouses were completed, and a Port Corporation was founded in 1958. The harbour is also the base of the Sri Lanka Navy’s Western Fleet.
From an open roadstead to an 18-metre transshipment hub, Colombo’s record rests on one fixed fact, its position near the tip of the Indian subcontinent. For how the island’s coast and relief shape that position, see our guide to Sri Lanka’s geography; for the sea lanes that pass it, read about Indian Ocean trade routes; and for the rival across the water, compare Colombo with the Port of Mumbai and Nhava Sheva.