Durban congestion pushes container delays to 20 days

Container delays at the Port of Durban are approaching 20 days, and one of South Africa's largest automotive components suppliers says the disruption could cost it up to a quarter of its annual earnings. Metair, listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, put the warning in a shareholder announcement this week. The numbers are blunt: additional costs incurred and expected during 2026 will run between 20% and 25% of its reported 2025 EBITDA before exceptional items. None of it, the company added, can be recovered from customers.

What went wrong at Durban Gateway?

The trigger is a new terminal operating system at Durban Gateway Terminal. Metair said problems associated with its introduction have severely disrupted container handling. Equipment failures and limited crane availability have compounded the delays.

The terminal is operated by Philippines-based International Container Terminal Services Inc. (ICTSI) under a 25-year partnership with Transnet, South Africa's state-owned port and rail operator. The partnership is young; the operating system, evidently, was not ready for prime time.

What does this change for shippers?

For Metair, the commercial damage is already visible. The company said the disruption forced it onto expensive airfreight since August, alongside increased road transport and additional overtime costs. Delayed deliveries of components and raw materials have also contributed to the temporary stoppage of one customer's production line.

That last detail matters. When an automotive components maker misses deliveries, it doesn't just lose margin — it stops an assembly line somewhere. Metair supplies vehicle manufacturers, and a halted production line is the kind of event that ends contracts rather than quarters.

The company warned that prolonged disruption could prevent it from meeting contractual commitments and potentially force it to invoke force majeure provisions. Force majeure is corporate speak for "we cannot legally deliver, please don't sue." Shippers and forwarders routing through Durban should read that as a signal: the region's automotive supply chain is one prolonged outage away from contractual breakdown.

How long will the congestion last?

Not quickly, by Metair's own assessment. The company said meaningful improvement in Durban's congestion might not occur before the end of the first quarter of 2027. That's a timeline measured in quarters, not weeks.

The cost arithmetic is worth translating. If the disruption consumes 20-25% of a year's EBITDA, and congestion persists into early 2027, Metair faces roughly 18 months of elevated logistics spend — airfreight in place of ocean freight, road in place of rail, overtime in place of predictable schedules. For a components manufacturer operating on thin industrial margins, that's an existential squeeze, not an inconvenience.

What's the wider read for the trade?

Durban is sub-Saharan Africa's busiest container port, and its Gateway Terminal is the flagship of Transnet's effort to bring in private operators like ICTSI to fix chronic port underperformance. A botched systems cutover at exactly that flagship is an awkward look for the reform programme. For carriers, congestion at this scale effectively removes capacity from the trade lane, as vessels wait longer at berth and schedule reliability degrades. For importers and exporters across South Africa's manufacturing belt, Metair's experience is a preview rather than an outlier.

The company's decision to flag the risk in a JSE announcement, rather than quietly absorb it, tells its own story. Costs unrecoverable from customers, a customer production line stopped, and force majeure on the table — that's a supplier signalling to its market that the port, not the factory, is now the binding constraint.

Watch the first quarter of 2027. If Durban's congestion has not meaningfully eased by then, expect more JSE announcements like this one — and more force majeure letters in automotive inboxes.