One company, one in seven of the world’s boxes
PSA Singapore handled a record 44.5 million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU) in 2025, up more than 8% on the year — the largest volume any container terminal operator moves through a single port anywhere. Its parent, PSA International, moved 105 million TEU across its worldwide network in the same year, a 5% rise and a record, after first crossing the 100 million mark in 2024. PSA is not a shipping line, not a government agency and not the port regulator. It is a terminal operator: the company that owns the cranes, runs the yards and turns the ships around. It is wholly owned by Temasek, Singapore’s state investment company, which makes it commercially run but strategically anchored.
What PSA actually sells is a connection
The product is transhipment. Around 85% of the containers PSA handles in Singapore arrive on one vessel and leave on another, never entering the local economy — a box from a feeder ship out of Surabaya or Chittagong swapped onto a mainline vessel bound for Rotterdam. A shipping line calls at Singapore because from one berth its cargo can connect to some 600 ports worldwide, with daily sailings to every major port, and because PSA’s terminals — 56 berths with a designed capacity of 46.5 million TEU a year in 2025 — turn ships around fast enough to hold tight schedules. Speed and connectivity are the product; the cranes are just how it is delivered. That is why throughput records matter: they are evidence the network effect is compounding, not eroding.
The name is a fossil, and the distinction matters
PSA once stood for Port of Singapore Authority, the statutory board formed in 1964 to run and regulate the harbour. The roles were split in the 1990s: the Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore (MPA) was created in 1996 to take over regulation — port waters, licensing, marine services, planning — and on 1 October 1997 the commercial operation was corporatised as PSA Corporation. “PSA” survives as a brand, no longer an acronym. The practical reading for anyone dealing with the port today: MPA is the regulator and landlord of the port ecosystem, PSA is the dominant container operator, and Jurong Port — a separate operator — handles much of the multipurpose, bulk and project cargo. When Singapore announces port policy, that is MPA; when a terminal breaks a throughput record, that is PSA.
The global portfolio is now bigger than the home port
PSA International operates across 179 locations in 45 countries, and in 2025 its terminals outside Singapore handled 60.4 million TEU — more than the flagship itself, though spread across dozens of ports from Antwerp to Mumbai to Panama. The group also runs PSA BDP, a supply-chain services arm, extending it beyond the quay into freight management. The structure matters for reading the company: Singapore supplies the operational reputation and the transhipment engine; the international portfolio supplies diversification against any single trade lane souring. Growth in 2025 was unbalanced — Singapore up more than 8%, the rest of the network up 2% — which says the hub is currently outrunning the spokes.
Tuas is where all of it is heading
PSA’s Singapore operations are mid-way through the largest relocation in the port’s history. Container operations at the city terminals — Tanjong Pagar, Keppel and Brani — are scheduled to consolidate at Tuas Port by 2027, with Pasir Panjang following by the 2040s, when Tuas is designed to reach around 65 million TEU of annual capacity as the world’s largest fully automated terminal. By February 2025 Tuas was running 11 berths and had passed 10 million cumulative TEU. The full story — phases, caissons, the 200-strong AGV fleet — is in the companion Tuas Port explainer.
How to read PSA from the outside
One honest caveat: PSA’s dominance is earned but not guaranteed. Transhipment cargo is the most footloose in shipping — it belongs to no national economy and follows reliability and price — and Malaysian rivals at Port Klang and Tanjung Pelepas compete on cost for the same connections. The 2025 record says the moat held in a volatile year; it does not say the moat is permanent, which is precisely why the Tuas investment is being made.
Around the port sits the industrial layer the Singapore Industry Index records — hauliers, forwarders and warehouse operators whose business runs through PSA’s gates daily, such as Poh Tiong Choon Logistics, the SGX-listed haulier running a fleet of over 1,000 cargo vehicles, and Halcon Primo Logistics, which operates a bonded hub serving port cargo. The wider set is on the Logistics & Supply Chain hub.