Laem Chabang Port is Thailand’s largest seaport and its main gateway for container trade, set on the eastern shore of the Gulf of Thailand in Chonburi Province, roughly 30 km south of Chonburi town and 25 km north of Pattaya. Construction began in 1988 and the container port was completed in 1991, built to take over from the congested river port at Khlong Toei in Bangkok. In 2024 it handled about 9.56 million TEU (twenty-foot equivalent units), which placed it 20th among the world’s container ports in Lloyd’s List’s One Hundred Container Ports 2025 ranking. It matters because much of the international shipping that reaches Thailand passes through its quays, including the output of the car, tyre and electronics plants in the industrial estate behind them, and because it anchors the industrial belt now called the Eastern Economic Corridor.
1935–1981: Khlong Toei and the limits of a river port
The story of Laem Chabang starts with the port it replaced. After the Siamese revolution of 1932, the new government wanted a proper harbour instead of transferring cargo between ships anchored off Ko Sichang and in the river. In 1934 it asked the League of Nations in Geneva for advice, and a royal decree of 6 August 1935 took land in Khlong Toei, on the east bank of the Chao Phraya, for a new port. Dredging and construction began in 1938, stopped with the Second World War in 1940, and resumed with a World Bank loan; the first phase opened in 1947.
Bangkok Port, as it was formally named, did its job for four decades, but the river set hard limits. Ships had to steam up a dredged channel some 66 km long from the river mouth at Samut Prakan, and the port could take vessels of no more than about 12,000 deadweight tonnes, 172 m long and 8.2 m in draught. Even after a large expansion in the early 1980s, Khlong Toei was handling about 98 percent of Thailand’s imports and 60 percent of its outgoing goods through a single inland site hemmed in by the city. As container ships grew, Thailand needed deep water, and the nearest deep water to Bangkok lay on the eastern shore of the gulf.
1981–1991: The Eastern Seaboard plan and the first berths
From 1981 the National Economic and Social Development Board named Laem Chabang, then a stretch of pineapple plantations in Si Racha and Bang Lamung districts, as a target for a new urban and industrial community under the Eastern Seaboard Development Project. The plan bundled several pieces together: an international deep-sea port, export industrial estates, a railway spur to the existing Bangkok–Sattahip line, and housing for the workforce. The Eastern Seaboard programme itself was written into Thailand’s Fifth Economic and Social Development Plan (1982–1986). The World Bank declined to fund it, judging that it lacked “economic rationality”, and Japan stepped in with 178.8 billion yen (about US$1.6 billion) in loans that underwrote 16 projects, among them ports, roads, waterworks and industrial parks. Work on the port complex began in 1988 and the container port was completed in 1991.
The site offered one of the few deep-water harbours on Thailand’s coast, about 120 km from what is now Suvarnabhumi Airport: close enough to serve the capital’s factories, but on open coast, free of the river channel and its draught limit. Behind the quays the Laem Chabang Industrial Estate was laid out on 569 ha between the harbour and Sukhumvit Road, with a general industrial zone that attracted Mitsubishi’s car and engine plants, Michelin Siam and Fujitsu General. The civil administration followed the port: a Laem Chabang subdistrict municipality was proclaimed in the Government Gazette on 4 December 1991 and came into force on 3 January 1992.
1991–2000: Overtaking Bangkok as Thailand’s busiest seaport
Once ocean-going container ships could berth at Laem Chabang, traffic drained from the river quickly. Imports through Bangkok Port fell by around 40 percent, and by 1997, according to the Port Authority of Thailand (PAT), Laem Chabang had become the country’s busiest seaport, just six years after its container quays opened. Bangkok kept a role for smaller feeder ships and domestic cargo, but the balance had flipped for good.
The PAT itself changed form at the end of the decade. Created by the Port Authority of Thailand Act of 1951 as a government agency under the transport ministry, it was converted into a state corporation in 2000. Rather than running every crane itself, the PAT is responsible for the port overall and engages private companies to manage its terminals and other operations. Among the groups it works with are Hutchison Ports Thailand and Singapore’s PSA International, and the Eastern Sea Laem Chabang Terminal (ESCO) is one of the operators based in the port, so international port groups work side by side with Thai companies on the same stretch of coast.
2004–2014: Rail links and the climb past 6 million TEU
Lloyd’s List and American Association of Port Authorities figures give Laem Chabang about 3.5 million TEU in 2004, rising to about 5.1 million in 2008. The global financial crisis knocked it back to roughly 4.5 million in 2009, but growth resumed, and the port passed 6 million TEU in 2013.
Rail was part of the plan from the start, since the original Eastern Seaboard scheme called for a line to connect with the Bangkok–Sattahip railway. On the State Railway of Thailand’s Eastern Line, a branch from Chachoengsao Junction heads south towards Sattahip, and at Si Racha Junction a further branch runs into the port itself. A double-track line between Chachoengsao Junction and Laem Chabang opened in January 2012, giving container trains a faster run towards Bangkok. By road, Sukhumvit Road (Highway 3) runs past the port gates on its way between Bangkok and Pattaya, and Motorway 7 passes just inland.
By 2014 the port handled about 6.5 million TEU and ranked around 20th in the world. The physical layout had grown to fill 10.41 km², with seven container terminals, a multipurpose terminal, a ro-ro terminal for vehicle carriers, a passenger ro-ro terminal, a general cargo terminal and a shipyard terminal, all able to take post-Panamax ships.
2016–2020: The Eastern Economic Corridor era
After the 2014 coup, the military government, the National Council for Peace and Order, announced a special economic zone for the old Eastern Seaboard: the Eastern Economic Corridor (EEC), covering Chonburi, Chachoengsao and Rayong provinces and a key part of the “Thailand 4.0” economic policy announced in 2016. The zone was formally established on 17 January 2017, and its governing law, the Eastern Special Development Zone Act, was proclaimed on 15 May 2019. Laem Chabang, together with the industrial port at Map Ta Phut in Rayong, became the corridor’s sea gateway, and the EEC’s budget of 1.5 trillion baht for its first five years paid for new rail, airport and port works around it.
The PAT’s annual statistics show what the port looked like at the start of this period. In fiscal year 2016 Laem Chabang recorded 6,312 vessel calls and 72.3 million tonnes of cargo, and container volume rose 4.2 percent to about seven million TEU. Bangkok Port, by comparison, handled 1.5 million TEU. In fiscal 2017 (October 2016 to September 2017) Laem Chabang moved 7.7 million TEU and also received 59 passenger liners; Princess Cruises and Celebrity Cruises both use it as a port of call.
The biggest of those works is a high-speed railway linking Don Mueang, Suvarnabhumi and U-Tapao airports, for which a 224.5-billion-baht contract was signed with a Charoen Pokphand-led consortium on 24 October 2019. The next year the COVID-19 pandemic cut throughput from about 8.1 million TEU in 2019 to about 7.5 million in 2020, the port’s first annual fall since 2009.
2021–2024: Record volumes and a 9.5-million-TEU year
The rebound was quick. Laem Chabang handled about 8.3 million TEU in 2021 and a record 8.74 million in 2022, eased slightly to 8.68 million in 2023, when Lloyd’s List ranked it 16th in the world, and then jumped to about 9.56 million in 2024. Its ranking moved the other way that year because rival ports grew faster still: the Lloyd’s List edition covering 2024 volumes put Laem Chabang 20th.
The town around the port has grown in step. Laem Chabang became a city municipality (thesaban nakhon) on 24 May 2010, and by 2019 it had 88,271 registered residents plus an estimated 60,000 workers living there without registering. More than 200 companies operate factories within its limits, making it the largest employer of industrial workers in Chonburi Province. Within the municipality stand three oil refineries, run by Thai Oil, Esso (Thailand) and Thai Lube Base Oil, along with oil depots of Thai Oil, Esso and PTT, so this stretch of coast is an energy hub as well as the country’s main container gate.
2023 onward: a Si Racha oil spill and the Kra land bridge plan
Environmental pressure has not eased. On 3 September 2023 a pipeline filling a tanker off a Thai Oil jetty at Si Racha, just north of the port, ruptured and spilled 50 to 70 cubic metres of oil, leaving a 5 km slick in the gulf; Thai Oil was allowed to use 6,000 litres of dispersant on it. Planning, meanwhile, has turned to the other side of the peninsula. The Southern Economic Corridor, covering Chumphon, Ranong, Surat Thani and Nakhon Si Thammarat, is designed to connect with the EEC, and its centrepiece is a land bridge across the Kra Isthmus: an 89.35 km transport link between two new deep-sea ports, one at Laem Riow in Chumphon on the gulf and one at Laem Ao Ang in Ranong on the Andaman Sea. Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin promoted the scheme to investors at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2024, though it has drawn criticism from people living along the route.
Laem Chabang today is the product of one decision made in the early 1980s, to move Thailand’s seaborne trade out of a river and onto open coast, and of four decades of factories following the quays. For how the shallow gulf itself shapes shipping to Laem Chabang, Bangkok and Map Ta Phut, see our guide to the Gulf of Thailand; the manufacturing that fills its containers is covered in our overview of the economy of Thailand, and its nearest regional rival on the Strait of Malacca is described in our article on Port Klang.