Cape Town terminal races to match landside capacity with deeper-water ambition

JOHANNESBURG — Cape Town’s container terminal has a berthing story and a stacking story, and for years they have not moved in sync. Ships and exporters feel the gap as wind delays, truck queues and yard congestion. Transnet’s answer in the near term is less about a new harbour mouth than about landside capacity.

Parliamentary oversight reporting on a June 2025 visit to Transnet divisions at the Cape Town port summarised Phase 2B as a landside expansion designed to raise terminal capacity from about 1.0 million TEU to about 1.4 million TEU a year. The package described includes container-stack upgrades, a rail marshalling yard and a permanent truck-staging area, with construction scheduled to begin in January 2026 so landside capacity can catch the terminal’s existing berthing envelope.

AB24 dates those figures to the oversight record and contemporaneous local reporting. Readers should treat TEU targets as planning capacity, not a guarantee of realised throughput in any given year.

Deeper basins remain a medium-term ask

Business groups in the Western Cape have separately pressed Transnet National Ports Authority on wind-mitigation hardware and deeper basins capable of handling larger container ships. Cape Chamber commentary in the mid-2020s characterised deeper-basin work — including concepts linked to a future Berth 605-type expansion — as sitting in medium-term planning rather than as a confirmed 2025–26 start. Short-term plans emphasised wind mitigation and operational resilience.

That sequencing matters for fruit exporters, wine shippers and automotive logistics that use Cape Town as a seasonal peak node. A deeper berth without yard and rail capacity recreates the same queue on a bigger ship. A bigger yard without reliable marine access still loses sailings to wind and draft limits.

What exporters are lobbying for

The political economy is straightforward. Agriculture and manufacturing employers want predictable gate turns and fewer “terminal full” days during peak season. Labour and port communities want investment that does not arrive only as overtime pressure. National Treasury and Transnet’s balance sheet sit between them. AB24 is not inventing a new dredging tender award in this piece; where specific marine-works environmental studies exist for other Transnet ports, they should not be casually reassigned to Table Bay.

Continental context

Cape Town’s pinch points rhyme with complaints from Durban, Lagos, Tema and Mombasa: African trade growth is running into twentieth-century landside design. Corridor digitisation on the West African coast and battery-plant exports from Cape industry both assume boxes can clear a terminal. When they cannot, AfCFTA speeches and manufacturing strategies become inventory stuck behind a gate.

Phase 2B is therefore best read as a reliability project first. If stack density, rail marshalling and truck staging land on schedule, exporters get hours back. Deeper water, if and when financed, is the next argument — not a substitute for the one now under construction.

Operationally, Cape Town’s wind regime is not a footnote. Terminal managers have spent seasons managing vessel bunching when wind limits crane operations. Landside works do not calm the south-easter, but better truck staging and rail marshalling can clear boxes faster when the cranes are able to work — converting brief weather windows into higher daily moves.

Transnet’s wider recovery narrative — equipment procurement, private partnerships at other terminals, balance-sheet repair — forms the national backdrop. Cape Town’s Phase 2B is one node in that story. Exporters will judge it by gate turnaround times and vessel cut-off reliability in the 2026–27 fruit season, not by a groundbreaking speech.

AB24 will watch for published construction progress notices, any revision to the 1.4 million TEU planning figure, and clarity on when deeper-berth environmental and financing steps leave the medium-term tray. Until then, the accurate framing is landside catch-up first, marine deepening later.

Southern Africa’s manufacturing and agriculture strategies assume a working Cape gateway. Phase 2B is the attempt to make that assumption less heroic.

Sources: PMG Select Committee oversight report on Transnet at Cape Town port (visit 18 June 2025; report dated 23 July 2025); Cape Argus / Transnet Port Terminals planning coverage; Cape Chamber commentary on wind mitigation and deeper basins. TEU figures and January 2026 construction timing attributed to those public records.

— AB24 · Johannesburg