There was a time when a ship could determine the fate of a port simply by refusing to call there. For centuries, Galle was Ceylon’s principal maritime gateway, a familiar stopping place for the great steamship lines and an important coaling station on the routes to the East. Colombo was a less impressive proposition, an exposed roadstead whose limitations were obvious to mariners. Yet, within a generation, the balance had changed so completely that one visitor could write that “Colombo owes its existence as a seaport to the genius of John Coode”, while another observed that Galle had been “quite extinguished by its powerful rival”. Today, Colombo is the 20th busiest container Port in the world.
Colombo handled 8,291,178 Twenty-foot Equivalent Units (TEUs) last year (in 2025), its highest annual throughput on record. In the first six months of this year (2026), it handled 4,444,034 TEUs, compared with 3,972,053 during the corresponding period of 2025, an increase of 11.9 per cent. But rankings do not tell us whether the infrastructure, institutions and commercial relationships that produced the result will remain sufficiently adaptable as the shipping industry is reshaped by geopolitics, digitalisation, decarbonisation, automation and increasingly unpredictable trade routes.
Colombo offered better prospects
That is precisely why Colombo’s 19th-Century story deserves to be remembered, not as colonial nostalgia but as a study in how maritime importance can be created. The idea of an artificial Harbour had initially been associated with Galle in 1866. By 1870 however, Governor Hercules George Robert Robinson argued that Colombo offered better prospects for expanded Harbour accommodation. A breakwater was pushed into waters exposed to the south-west monsoon. The seabed was dredged. Quarries were opened. Railways moved granite towards the Harbour. Concrete blocks weighing many tons were fabricated and lowered into the sea.
The engineering records reveal how uncertain that undertaking was. A 14-ton block was swept away during an unusually heavy south-west monsoon in 1878. The following year (1879), sand was driven over the foundations. Engineers had initially estimated waves at about nine feet, only to record much larger waves outside the breakwater.
John Kyle’s 1887 account records the scale of the undertaking, from a Mahara quarry producing a “minimum output” of 100 tons of granite a day to the 180-ton Titan used to place the Harbour blocks. He also described the convict workforce as “an important addition to the breakwater staff and a great profit to the Colony”. But, the Harbour’s construction disrupted existing livelihoods, with fisherman Santiago Guru Fernando reporting that blasting destroyed his fishing canoe, his “only means of obtaining my livelihood”, while the Solicitor General James Cecil Walter Pereira stated that “The open shore belongs to the people of the country.”
Lalith pushed Colombo towards containerisation and transhipment
The other great turning point came after 1979, when the then Shipping Minister Lalith William Samarasekera Athulathmudali pushed Colombo towards containerisation and transhipment, and helped create the Ports Authority and oversaw the development of the Jaya Container Terminals with Japanese assistance. A Japan International Cooperation Agency study subsequently recognised Colombo’s “geographic superiority” for international container transhipment, helping to lay the foundation for the Port that exists today.
In 1998, the Authority effectively held 100% of the container-terminal market. South Asia Gateway Terminals (SAGT) entered the following year (1999) with about 4%, and, by 2009, had reached 50.51%, briefly moving ahead of the Authority. The Colombo International Container Terminals (CICT) then began operations in 2013. From a 1.34% share in its first year, the CICT reached 34.92% by 2016 and subsequently became the largest operator. By 2024, its share had reached 43.03%, compared with 30.97% for the Authority and 26% for the SAGT. In 2025, the CICT accounted for 39.17%, the Authority 28.71%, the SAGT 23.48% and the Colombo West International Terminal 8.64%.
Colombo’s Container Surge, 1998–2026: Graphic © NilanthaIlangamuwa
These numbers show the disappearance of the old single-operator model and the emergence of a multi-terminal system in which several operators contribute to the same national Harbour. A strategically important Port does not cease to be national infrastructure because a private company operates a terminal. Nor does State ownership automatically guarantee strategic control if the State lacks the technical, financial and regulatory capacity to govern a sophisticated modern Port. What matters is the quality of the concession, the allocation of the risk, transparency, performance obligations, regulation, data governance and the ability of the State to protect long-term national interests while allowing private operators to bring capital, technology and global commercial networks. Colombo’s own history offers little support for the idea that maritime development has ever been produced by one institution acting alone.
The United Nations Trade and Development’s (UNCTAD) Review of Maritime Transport 2025 describes global shipping as entering a period of “fragile growth, rising costs and mounting uncertainty”. Maritime trade grew by 2.2% in 2024 but was expected to grow by only 0.5% in 2025, with average annual growth of around 2% projected for 2026–2030. More revealingly, geopolitical disruption has begun altering the physical geography of shipping.
For Colombo, rerouting can bring additional calls and transhipment business. But, a temporary increase caused by disruption is not the same as a durable maritime advantage. Shipping lines can change routes again. New ports can expand. Vessel sizes can change. Cargo origins can shift. Fuel economics can change. A port that builds capacity on the assumption that today’s route map will survive tomorrow may discover that it has invested heavily in yesterday’s shipping system.
Alternative-fuel vessel
The UNCTAD warns that technological, environmental and geoeconomic changes are converging rapidly. Alternative-fuel vessels now represent more than half of new ship tonnage on order, while more than 90% of the active fleet still operates on conventional fuels. The organisation also warns that automation and digitalisation can improve efficiency while increasing cyber risks. Its central question is whether adaptation will be “managed or chaotic, inclusive or divisive, sustainable or merely survivable”.
The International Maritime Organisation (IMO) has already begun setting the framework for that future. In March, its Facilitation Committee approved an IMO Strategy on Maritime Digitalisation focused on interoperability, system standardisation, data sharing and effective data governance. The strategy is intended to become an overarching IMO policy, but, it still requires further review before submission to the IMO Assembly next year (in 2027). The Committee has also stressed the need for maritime digital systems to remain resilient against disruption and cyber threats.
Even the ships themselves are changing. In May, the IMO adopted the first global Code of Safety for Maritime Autonomous Surface Ships, establishing a framework for artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled and remotely operated commercial vessels. A Port preparing seriously for the next generation of shipping will eventually have to accommodate vessels that are not simply larger versions of today’s ships but increasingly sophisticated digital systems that happen to float.
This creates a striking historical parallel. The engineers of the 19th-Century had to understand waves, seabeds, monsoons and the behaviour of concrete structures under pressure. The engineers and administrators of the 21st-Century are increasingly being compelled to understand algorithms, cyber threats, data flows, energy systems and autonomous operations while still dealing with storms, floods and the physical limits of the coastline.
Colombo’s position is heavily connected to transhipment, which has made the Port an important redistribution point between major shipping networks and South Asian markets. But, transhipment also means dependence on decisions made by international carriers. Containers can pass through Colombo in enormous numbers without necessarily generating an equivalent expansion of Sri Lankan manufacturing, exports, logistics services and value-added activity. The real prize is not simply to handle more containers. It is to capture more economic value from the movement of those containers.
That means that the next Colombo Port cannot be conceived as a collection of terminals separated from the wider economy. Its future is connected to Customs, roads, railways, warehousing, distribution, ship repair, maritime services, energy, digital infrastructure, manufacturing and export industries, but also to the agility of the administrative structure ultimately responsible for protecting the national interest.
The pressure on Colombo will also increase as other maritime hubs develop. Singapore, Port Klang and Tanjung Pelepas (Malaysia), Dubai (United Arab Emirates), Salalah (Oman) and expanding Indian ports are investing, digitising, deepening and reorganising. The question, consequently, is not whether Colombo is geographically well placed. It plainly is. The question is whether it can remain sufficiently attractive to the shipping networks that determine where vessels call and where cargo is transferred. Its next great advantage may not be found simply beneath the waterline. It may be found in the quality of the systems, institutions, technology, people, energy and economic networks that determine what happens before a ship arrives, while it is in Port and after it leaves.
The writer is a freelance contributor based in Colombo
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The views and opinions expressed in this column are those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect those of this publication