Hambantota International Port has handled more than one million containers since new quay cranes were commissioned in 2025, the port operator said, as it pushes a US$108 million equipment programme intended to lift annual capacity to two million containers.
The port put the cumulative figure at 1,002,232 twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs) — 428,036 TEUs in 2025 and 574,196 TEUs so far in 2026 — in a statement reported by EconomyNext and Lanka Business Online.
The figure is cumulative, not annual
The one-million number covers two years of throughput added together, counted from the commissioning of the port’s new quay cranes in 2025. It is not an annual rate. On the operator’s own figures Hambantota’s 2026 run-rate is around 574,000 TEUs for the year to date — well under the two-million-TEU annual capacity the port says it is building towards, and a fraction of Colombo’s volumes, where the Adani–John Keells West terminal alone doubled to 3.2 million TEUs of capacity when its second phase opened this month.
What the operator said
“Crossing one million TEUs is an important achievement for HIP and a strong indication of the confidence our customers are placing in the port,” said Wilson Qu, chief executive of Hambantota International Port Group (HIPG), the China Merchants-led joint venture that runs the port. He said growth had come from “close engagement with shipping lines, operational reliability and the ability to respond quickly to changing customer requirements.”
Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC) is the port’s principal container customer. In April the MSC Marie Leslie set a single-vessel handling record at Hambantota with 7,968 container moves, equivalent to 13,260 TEUs, surpassing marks set by the MSC Ilenia and MSC Ruby in March. The port recorded its highest monthly throughput in June, at 80,325 TEUs.
The expansion
The centrepiece is six new quay cranes and 16 rubber-tyred gantry cranes, part of a US$108 million investment in container-handling machinery, expected to be commissioned by the end of February 2027. The operator says the equipment will activate a further 1,300 metres of berth space, taking total container quay length to nearly two kilometres, and expand the container yard by 30%.
Chief operations officer Tommy Yang said the strategy was “developing capacity ahead of demand while maintaining operational efficiency and financial sustainability.”
The US$108 million programme is not new: it was announced in March 2026 and reported at the time, with the same two-million-TEU target attached. What the latest statement adds is the cumulative throughput milestone.
Both outlets are running the same HIPG statement, so the figures in it are the operator’s own and have not been independently verified. Neither filing gives Hambantota’s annual capacity today, the transhipment-versus-domestic split, or the tariff and lease terms under which the China Merchants joint venture operates the port.
