DUBAI — DP World and the Fujairah Ports Authority signed a 50-year concession agreement Wednesday to build two new cargo terminals on the UAE’s Gulf of Oman coastline, a half-century infrastructure commitment that treats the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz to large commercial shipping not as a temporary crisis but as a structural shift in global trade geography.
The deal covers two separate facilities. Al Rugaylat, the first terminal, will handle container operations at an annual capacity of 2.5 million twenty-foot equivalent units and is engineered to accommodate Ultra Large Container Vessels, the class of ship that currently cannot call at UAE east coast ports. The second, the Dibba General Cargo Terminal, adds 3.6 million tonnes of annual throughput capacity across a broader range of cargo types. Together the two facilities would lift the UAE’s total container handling capacity from 19.4 million to approximately 22 million TEUs. Construction on each phase is projected to take between 24 and 30 months.
The context for the decision is the ongoing near-shutdown of Hormuz commercial traffic. Daily Hormuz transits fell from a prewar baseline of roughly 130 to near-zero for large tankers in the weeks after US-Iran strikes resumed this month, as insurance markets and shipping operators concluded that no maritime corridor through the strait was reliably safe. What began as a security disruption has lasted long enough for the world’s largest ports operator to price it as a permanent infrastructure question.
“The partnership with DP World marks an important milestone in Fujairah’s continued development as one of the region’s most important maritime gateways,” said Sheikh Saleh Bin Mohamed Al Sharqi, Chairman of the Fujairah Ports Authority. The UAE has maintained Fujairah as an alternative maritime hub since the 1980s tanker war between Iran and Iraq, including a pipeline from Abu Dhabi’s onshore oil fields to Fujairah’s storage and loading infrastructure that carries approximately 1.5 million barrels per day when operating at full capacity. The new terminal concession extends the logic of that earlier hedge from oil shipments to containerized trade.
DP World operates terminals in 78 countries and handled roughly 80 million TEUs in 2024. Its Jebel Ali facility, on Dubai’s Arabian Gulf coast, is currently the world’s ninth-busiest container port. A Fujairah hub would give DP World a bifurcated UAE system, with Jebel Ali handling Gulf-facing cargo and Fujairah handling east-coast and transhipment flows, connected by a domestic inland logistics network. Cargo can route from Asia into Fujairah, transit overland to Jebel Ali, and distribute across the Gulf without touching the strait.
The investment arrives as the Gulf faces a double chokepoint. The Houthi naval blockade in the Red Sea has simultaneously cut off the Bab al-Mandeb strait as a viable southward route for Saudi crude to Asian markets, forcing tanker diversions through Suez or around the Cape of Good Hope. For Asian importers of oil and manufactured goods, India and South Korea and China among them, both of the Gulf’s main export corridors are now compromised. Fujairah’s location on the Gulf of Oman places it outside both threat environments.
The bypass pipeline already handles the Hormuz alternative for oil: the Abu Dhabi Crude Oil Pipeline, built with exactly this scenario in mind, routes around the strait entirely. Its limitation is scale. At roughly 1.5 million barrels per day of practical capacity, it offsets only a fraction of the 17 million barrels per day that crossed Hormuz in prewar conditions. The new DP World terminals address an entirely different category of cargo: containerized goods, manufactured products, and general merchandise that have no comparable bypass route and constitute a growing share of Gulf import trade.
UAE crude exports surged to near 2017 highs in June as the Emirates leveraged its existing Hormuz bypass infrastructure and its May exit from OPEC to maintain uninterrupted supply to global markets, a positioning that allowed Dubai to benefit commercially from the same crisis that shut Hormuz for everyone else. The new Fujairah concession extends that same logic from petroleum to containerized trade. For Dubai’s economic planners, the current disruption is also an opportunity to capture trade flows that previously transited competing Gulf hubs.
The 50-year concession duration is not incidental. Port infrastructure typically requires 15 to 20 years to recoup capital costs under ordinary traffic assumptions. A 50-year deal signals that neither DP World nor Fujairah expects the commercial logic to be undone by an eventual resolution of the current conflict. They are betting that the restructuring of Gulf trade routes triggered by the US-Iran war will persist as a permanent feature of maritime geography, regardless of whether the shooting stops. The contract binds both parties to that assumption for half a century.
The investment cost was not disclosed. DP World and the Fujairah Ports Authority did not confirm a capital expenditure figure in Wednesday’s announcement. The construction timeline, measured in years per phase, means neither terminal will open before the current US-Iran conflict has either resolved or entrenched further. What the deal leaves unresolved is whether a conflict that prompted the infrastructure bet will also outlast it, and whether a Fujairah built for bypass trade will eventually compete with the Jebel Ali it was designed to supplement, or quietly wait for a Hormuz that never fully reopens.
