Cape Town port worst in the world, World Bank confirms
· The South African
A recent index issued by the World Bank and S&P Global Market Intelligence has ranked the Port of Cape Town at the bottom of the list.
Known as the Container Port Performance Index (CPPI), it provides annual ratings of how effectively a country’s port handles its traffic.
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The Port of Cape Town ranks 400th.
This officially makes it the worst performing container-port in the world.
This is just one below Conakry Port in Guinea, the same port used by the Russian military as a logistics hub in their West African operations.
How ports rank globally
The CPPI serves as a benchmark for how effectively a port handles container traffic.
It mainly focuses on the time a ship spends in port, including both wait and berth time.
The report is published once a year and should serve as a tool for both governments and port authorities to identify areas for improvement.
The evidence from the report for Cape Town is clear: ships are not moving in and out of it fast enough.
That said, the CPPI does state that its statistics are not intended to assign blame or make judgments about countries or ports.
How Transnet should approach the CPPI report
The CPPI is intended to serve as an objective, comparable indicator. It is therefore not supposed to be taken as an attack on South Africa’s Port Authorities’ singular inefficiencies.
Ports globally saw disruptions in 2025.
The organisation stressed on its website that disruptions, “such as the Red Sea crisis and reduced transit through the Panama Canal”, have negatively affected shipping logistics globally and in specific ways.
More ships have found themselves passing the Cape of Good Hope. What the CPPI report makes clear is that they are not being attended to quickly enough.
Durban Port is doing better
The report has offered some good news: the Port of Durban ranks better.
But it still ranked 398th globally and just two about Cape Town.
It might be in the right direction, but it is difficult to see this as a clear indication that everything is running smoothly.
The lost opportunity for South African shipping logistics
South Africa occupies a rare strategic position.
The Cape of Good Hope sea route, which skirts its entire coastline, has become one of the busiest detours in global trade since Red Sea attacks forced shipping away from the Suez Canal.
Traffic around the Cape surged by roughly 74% above prior-year levels as diversions accelerated, while Suez transits remain about 60% below pre-crisis volumes.
Few coastal nations sit so directly astride a corridor carrying this much of the world’s cargo.
Yet if the simple measurement that the CPPI provides is true, then the ports are not serving the vessels fast enough.