NCT, CCT or Patenga: Which Terminal Will Your Vessel Actually Get

Ask three different forwarders which terminal a feeder vessel will berth at in Chattogram and you might get three different answers, and honestly none of them would be wrong on the day they said it. The port now splits container traffic across the General Cargo Berth, the Chittagong Container Terminal, the New Mooring Container Terminal, and since 2024, the Patenga Container Terminal run by a Saudi operator. Each one has its own crane fleet, its own draft ceiling, and its own queue. For an owner or charterer trying to plan a call, that matters more than it sounds. Queue position, berth prospect, permissible draft, pilot boarding and cargo-working conditions can change with the latest CPA notice, tide, traffic, equipment, labour and receiver readiness.

New Mooring Container Terminal (NCT), the workhorse

NCT is still the biggest of the lot. Five berths along roughly a kilometre of quay, four jetties, room for up to five vessels at once. It's where roughly half of the port's container volume moves through, and on a good month it has handled more boxes than its design capacity was ever meant to carry, the terminal's rated yard capacity sits around 1.2 million TEU a year but throughput has run ahead of that for a while now. Maximum LOA by day is 186 metres, dropping to 175 metres for night transits, with draft capped at 9.5 metres in daylight and 9.0 at night. CDDL has managed the terminal since July 2024 and operations have noticeably sped up since, better coordination between the berthing points, delivery points and gate operations, according to port officials, though anyone who's had a vessel sit at anchorage waiting for an NCT slot will tell you congestion hasn't disappeared, it's just less bad than it was. On 8 October 2026 CPA signed a 15-year concession with DP World to operate and maintain it; CPA keeps ownership. Confirm the current operator and handover date before relying on this.

Chittagong Container Terminal (CCT), smaller, steadier

CCT is the older sibling of NCT in some ways, three berths, 450 metres of quay, run by Saif Powertec. Same draft and LOA limits as NCT (9.5 m / 186 m by day), four quay gantry cranes plus a couple of mobile harbour cranes. Its yard capacity is smaller, somewhere around 700,000 TEU annually including the Dhaka-bound ICD allocation, so it tends to handle a more predictable, steadier flow of feeder traffic rather than the volume swings NCT sees.

Patenga Container Terminal (PCT), the new variable

This is the one that's changed the calculus over the last two years. PCT sits near the Karnaphuli estuary, close to the dry dock, with three container jetties plus a dolphin oil jetty, meaning a tanker can be working alongside while three container ships are berthed at the same time. It's run by Red Sea Gateway Terminal (RSGT) of Saudi Arabia under a 22-year concession, the first time Bangladesh has handed terminal operations to an international company. Rated capacity is around 450,000 TEU a year, and for its first eighteen months or so PCT ran well under that, partly because it could only handle export boxes until a customs scanner went in. RSGT paid for that scanner itself in May 2025, about $3 million out of pocket, and import handling picked up from there. Four new ship-to-shore cranes arrived in June 2026, a $30 million order from China's SANY, on top of $26 million already spent on rubber-tyred gantries the year before. The operator says full-capacity running starts around mid-2026. Maximum draft at PCT is 11 metres, deeper than either NCT or CCT, which makes it the more comfortable option for larger feeder vessels that would otherwise be squeezed at the older terminals.

General Cargo Berth (GCB), still doing the heavy lifting, literally

Six berths (Jetty 2, 3, 4, 5, 7 and 8) handle everything that isn't boxed, breakbulk, project cargo, bagged goods. No shore cranes here; loading and discharge runs entirely off the ship's own gear, so a gearless vessel simply can't use GCB. Draft tops out around 8.5 metres. It's an unglamorous part of the port but for owners moving steel coils, machinery or bagged cement, it's still the only realistic berth.

Planning point: Berth counts, draft and LOA figures below are indicative; verify against current terminal and CPA particulars for the vessel.

Why this matters for berth planning

The Chattogram Port Authority decides which terminal a vessel gets, not the agent and not the line, so the honest answer to "which terminal will we get" is usually "whichever one has a free slot when you arrive." What an agent can actually control is making sure your vessel's particulars, gear or gearless, draft, LOA, cargo type, are submitted early enough that CPA isn't trying to fit a square vessel into a terminal that can't take it. We've seen gearless feeders get locked at anchorage for days simply because nobody flagged early that GCB was never an option for them, the C&F agent finds out at jetty side that the cargo can't be discharged the way it was planned, and by then the vessel's already burning anchorage time it didn't need to. That's the kind of thing that should be sorted before the vessel is even off the coast of Sri Lanka, not after it's anchored at the outer bar.