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A consignment of three more quay gantry cranes is likely to reach the port by the second week of this October.
It will further expedite the Chattogram port's containerised cargo handling,
A vessel carrying the gantry cranes left a Chinese port last Friday as part of an agreement for supplying six gantry cranes for the premier port.
These cranes have been procured from China at a cost of Tk 3.45 billion, said sources with the Chittagong Port Authority.
The first consignment of three quay gantry cranes arrived in the port last month. Each of these 40-tonne capacity cranes will handle 25 to 30 units of 20-foot-long containers an hour.
The cranes will be installed at the berths of the New Mooring Container Terminal.
Sources said four more gantry cranes will arrive in the port by the first quarter of 2019.
An 18-member team of experts from the supplier company Shanghai Zenhua AB Industries of China is now working on installation of the three cranes that arrived last month (August), sources said. The installation is likely to be completed next month.
Gantry crane is the key equipment required for loading and unloading of containers from and to the container vessels, as the practice of cargo shipment through these boxes has increased globally for the reason of better safety and security of cargo on the waterways.
Currently, the Chattogram port has four gantry cranes in operation. With the addition of 10 more cranes the port will have 14 gantry cranes in operation by the middle of next year.
Each of these gantry cranes will be able to handle additional 0.1 million containers a year and, as a result, the port will have an enhanced container handling capacity soon.
The port's annual container handling reached 2.8 million TEUs this year thanks to multiple development projects implemented over the last one year.
Chittagong Port Authority Chairman Commodore Zulfiquer Aziz said the port, which handles over 92 per cent of the country's total sea-borne export-import cargo, has been experiencing an unusual rise in containerised cargoes at an annual average of over 15 per cent for several years.
He said the port is now being enriched with many sophisticated equipment under a huge procurement scheme while other equipment is in the pipeline to reach the port within the first quarter of 2019.