THE WORLD Bank Container Port Performance Index for 2025 has just been released and it is showing some interesting trends. For instance, our top performer, Bell Bay, with a total throughput of nearly 28,000 TEU, was ranked at 171 closely followed by a more representative port, Melbourne, ranked at 182, an improvement of 83 places!
Similarly, Brisbane improved 76 places to 301 and even got a mention in the Index’s Top 20 ports improvement in CPPI 2025/2024 table. I’m unsure why these large jumps occurred, as I’m not aware of any major operational changes from the previous year at those ports. Our other ports, on the other hand, linger at the bottom of the table.
No doubt the usual suspects, such as the Institute for Public Affairs, the Productivity Commission, Shipping Australia and others will be out again criticising our ports’ performance. It might even elicit a comment from One Nation’s Pauline Hanson! Last year Shipping Australia made with some comments about the ranking of the English Premier League and a long discourse about apples and oranges to illustrate why we should not be critical of the Index focusing on waterside performance alone.
It should be noted, however, that effective supply chains operate not just on the waterside but also on the landside, and while the landside charges in Australia have escalated in recent years, landside performance of our ports has generally been one of the best in the world. Previous reports also included the following disclaimer: ‘The Index is based on available empirical objective data pertaining exclusively to time expended in a vessel stay in a port and should be interpreted as an indicative measure of container port performance, but not a definitive one (my italics).'
The Index made a comment that, “Several ports in upper-middle-income countries, particularly in East and South Asia, again outperformed many high-income peers, reflecting export orientation, inter-port competition, and sustained investment momentum”. I think what the authors missed, or did not want to highlight, is that in high-income countries there is usually more emphasis on safety and a more regulated (i.e., unionised) labour environment which contributes to higher safety standards, with less incidents, which in turn leads to taking less dangerous shortcuts (see photo) to improve productivity.
I have previously argued that, because of the size of container vessels calling at Australian ports (average size approximately 5000 TEU) it is difficult to achieve a high crane intensity (number of cranes that can be used on a ship simultaneously), which favours big ports that service big ships. Furthermore, Australia is located at the end of vessel routing (i.e., ships turn around once they have serviced three or four Australian ports), has very little transhipment volume, and is only a small player in the global container market. Thess factors affect decisions made by shipping lines that can have a detrimental effect on vessel performance.
Financial measures are not used in the production of the Index. For this we’ll have to wait for the publication of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s (ACCC) Container stevedoring monitoring report at the end of the year. We’ll see if there is any appetite for intervention by the regulator in some of the terminal handling charges that are currently being levied by stevedores and empty container parks and which are a bone of contention amongst shippers and logistics providers.
In the meantime, I look forward to readers’ comments.