News / Marsa Maroc set to invest in Casablanca facilities

ID 73576112 © TravelFaery | Dreamstime.com

Marsa Maroc, the partly state-owned Moroccan port operator, has unveiled a $444m investment plan to upgrade its existing facilities in the country.

According to Alphaliner, the vast majority of these funds, around $33m, will be invested in its two container terminals in Casablanca – Terminal à Conteneurs Est (TCE) and the Terminal à Conteneurs 3 (TC3).

The terminals are in urgent need of capacity expansion, as Casablanca has been operating at near-full capacity for almost a decade during a period when Morocco’s economy has significantly expanded, leading to a sustained growth in containerised import and export volumes.

According to an Economist report last week, the country has seen $40bn of new investment in manufacturing facilities since 2020, and exports have climbed over 60% in the same period.

While the port of Tanger Med – located opposite Algeciras across the Straits of Gibraltar and in which Marsa Maroc has several partnerships with a variety of international terminal operators and mainline container shipping lines – has garnered most of the investment which has catapulted it into the top tier of port worldwide, Casabalnca has become an increasingly important gateway in the country’s trading relationship.

The latest service to launch there will be the new intra-Europe SPS service from ONE, which will offer a port rotation of Valencia-Lisbon-Casablanca-Valencia with a bi-weekly frequency.

The Japanese shipping line confirmed that it would be calling at one of Marsa Maroc’s facilities, but has yet to notify the trade which vessels it will be deploy.

Currently the largest ships to call at Marsa Maroc’s quays in Casablanca are around the 3,500 teu level, deployed on MSC’s and Hapag-Lloyd’s separate Europe-West Africa services.

“$333m will be allocated to container facilities, particularly in Casablanca, where Marsa Maroc operates two of the three main terminals,” Alphaliner writes this week.

“Construction work will mainly consist of, on the one hand, deepening the berths of TCE to 14 metres (potentially 16 metres) and at TC3 to 12.5 metres.

“On the other hand, the TC3 pier will be lengthened by about 250 metres, with a target completion date in 2027,” it reports.

It added that the terminals would also receive new handling equipment, including five ship-to-shore gantry cranes and 32 yard gantry cranes, and altogether capacity at TCE will grow to 1.3m teu at TCE and to 900,000 teu at TC3 by 2030.

“Combined, this would result in a 45% increase to 1.9m teu for Marsa Maroc at Casablanca,” Alphaliner notes, although it is unlikely to alleviate the congestion pain regularly felt by carriers, shippers and forwarders at the port in the short-term.

According to the Xeneta-owned eeSea liner database, the port, which also includes the Somaport terminal owned by CMA CGM’s port arm Terminal Link, has been operating at near-full capacity since 2016, using the port industry standard that 75% utilisation is effectively full capacity.

Casablanca volumes:

Source: Xeneta/eeSea

According to eeSea’s line-up of services calling at the port’s terminals, the vast majority are either feeders or intra-Europe strings, although Marsa Maroc’s TCE facility handles Hapag-Lloyd’s and Grimaldi’s Europe-West Africa services, as well as a SeaLead’s Europe-South America east coast Medsa services; while MSC’s intra-Europe and its Europe-West Africa NWC-MOR-WAF services are consolidated at TC3.

CMA CGM, meanwhile, consolidates its Casablanca calls at the Somaport terminal.

According to its half-year results released at the end of August, Marsa Maroc handled just over 1.5m teu across all its facilities in the country in the first six months of 2025 – of which 850,000 teu was transshipment traffic, growing at 4% year-on-year, while import-export traffic grew 8% to 650,000 teu.