DP World moved 1m teu overland as Jebel Ali vessel calls collapsed 87%

DP World has moved more than 1m teu by road and rail from the UAE's east-coast ports to Jebel Ali and domestic markets in roughly eight months — even as container-vessel calls at Jebel Ali collapsed by 87%.

Shehab Mohamad Aljasmi, chief commercial officer for ports and terminals at DP World GCC, disclosed the volume figure at a media briefing in Dubai on 10 November. The overland operation ran from the first week of March through the end of October, shifting about 3,500 teu a day on average across the period.

The network behind that throughput is substantial. More than 3,000 trucks run on it, of which 700 are owned by DP World itself, with the remainder drawn from partner fleets.

How fast did the land bridge scale?

The pace of growth is visible in DP World's own markers. On 21 August, the company put the cumulative volume at 500,000 teu across the GCC — a figure that has since doubled to more than 1m teu in under three months.

That August milestone came with a statement from Ahmad Yousef Al-Hassan, chief executive officer and managing director of DP World GCC, who said: "Moving half a million TEUs overland shows the scale, resilience and flexibility of our network beyond the terminal gates."

In commercial terms, the doubling signals that cargo owners kept routing consignments through the UAE's east-coast terminals and paying for inland haulage, rather than waiting for vessel schedules on the Gulf side to normalise.

What happened to the vessel calls?

The trucks have kept Dubai supplied, but the ships have not returned. Container-vessel calls at Jebel Ali fell to 56 in October 2026 from 443 a year earlier, an 87% drop on WTCP Intelligence counts.

To put that in perspective: a port that once averaged more than a vessel call a day is now seeing fewer than two arrivals per week.

The redistribution is clearer on the Gulf of Oman side. Khor Fakkan recorded 34 calls in October, against six a year earlier. Fujairah logged 28, up from a baseline of one to four calls a month in the first half of 2025.

Together, the two east-coast ports handled 62 calls in October — more than Jebel Ali itself, a reversal of the UAE's traditional port hierarchy.

What does this mean for shippers and carriers?

For shippers, the shift means Gulf-bound cargo now regularly incurs an inland leg from the Gulf of Oman ports to Dubai and domestic markets, built into transit times and landed costs. The scale of the operation — 3,500 teu a day, sustained for months — suggests this is no temporary workaround but a functioning corridor.

For carriers, the call data shows deployments concentrated on east-coast terminals that can be reached without transiting the Strait of Hormuz, while Jebel Ali's berth demand has thinned dramatically. For forwarders, the land bridge has become the practical link between where vessels actually call and where Gulf cargo is ultimately consumed.

DP World's own investment in the route — 700 company-owned trucks within a 3,000-plus vehicle network — indicates the operator expects overland volumes to remain part of its GCC offering rather than a stopgap.

With the 1m-teu mark passed by the end of October and vessel calls still concentrated at Khor Fakkan and Fujairah, the trajectory points to further growth in overland volumes in the months ahead.