Bay Terminal Chattogram: Built Status vs Open Commercial Berth
A decade of announcements, three financing structures, and a draft limit problem it's meant to finally solve.
Practical position. Bay Terminal is not an open commercial berth for present Chattogram calls. Design draft targets sit well above current Karnaphuli river limits. Live appointments stay on existing outer-anchorage and jetty programmes under current CPA instruction.
Bay Terminal remains a future capacity project; it is not an open commercial berthing option for present Bangladesh calls.
Bay Terminal has been "two to three years away" for long enough that it's become something of a running joke among agents in Agrabad. It was first floated back in 2014, Sheikh Hasina broke ground on it in November 2018, and at various points officials have promised it would open in 2021, 2024, and 2026. As of mid-2026, the honest status is: financing is finally locked in, but very little steel is in the ground yet. Current coal-jetty or offshore-energy operations must be kept separate from future commercial-terminal design capacity; confirm the intended facility and the latest project or terminal instruction before fixing a call.
What it actually is
Bay Terminal isn't one terminal, it's a 900-acre complex planned along roughly 6.25 km of coastline running from behind the Chattogram EPZ at Patenga Beach to Rani Rashmoni Ghat. The plan calls for three berthing complexes: a 1,500-metre multipurpose terminal that CPA will build and run itself, a 1,225-metre container terminal under a PPP with PSA Singapore, and an 830-metre container terminal under a PPP with DP World of the UAE. Combined, the three are meant to add somewhere between 3 and 5 million TEU of annual capacity on top of what Chattogram handles today.
The number that actually matters: draft
Everything else about Bay Terminal is secondary to this one fact, it's being built to take vessels with up to 13-14 metres of draft, well beyond the roughly 9.5 metres the existing Karnaphuli berths can handle. That's the entire point of the project. Right now, larger ships dealing with that kind of draft shortage have to anchor offshore and transfer cargo onto lighterage vessels, or export boxes get shipped to Singapore or Colombo on smaller vessels before being loaded onto mother ships. Bay Terminal is meant to let those bigger vessels call directly, cutting out that transshipment leg entirely.
Where the money and the delays both come from
The World Bank approved a $650 million loan for the breakwater and access-channel dredging, the part CPA itself is responsible for, and the financing is in place. Reports in early 2026 said CPA expected to invite tenders for the construction contractor by March and appoint one by June; no appointment had been confirmed in the reports we found, so confirm the current procurement stage before relying on any start date. Land has mostly been acquired, but roughly 51 acres tied up with the forest department remained unresolved as of late 2025. CPA's own Bay Terminal Marine Infrastructure Development Project is now scheduled to run from April 2025 through June 2031, which lines up with what the CPA chairman has been telling stakeholders directly: operational by around 2030, not the earlier 2026 target.
For what it's worth, the shipping ministry has floated a more optimistic version of events in parliament, suggesting that once Patenga, Laldia and the first Bay Terminal phases come online, Chattogram could approach Singapore- or Colombo-level turnaround by 2029. That's the upbeat case. The CPA's own published project timeline, which actually has financing and contracts attached to it, points to 2031 for full completion.
What this means if you're planning ahead
For now, nothing changes operationally, vessels are still working off the existing NCT/CCT/PCT/GCB draft and LOA limits, and that's not going to shift for several more years regardless of which timeline turns out closer to reality. What's worth tracking is the procurement and contract news rather than the ground-breaking ceremonies; PSA Singapore and DP World moving from MoU to signed concession agreements will tell you far more about the real schedule than another ministerial statement will.
Planning Future Calls at Chattogram?
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