Jebel Ali Free Zone has brought the second phase of its logistics park into operation, an AED90m expansion adding about 33,445 square metres of Grade A warehousing. Behind it sits a port that moved 15.6 million TEU in 2025 against nameplate capacity of 19.4 million, and a free zone of more than 11,000 companies generating the origin-and-destination cargo that now drives growth.
Jebel Ali Free Zone has started operations at the second phase of its logistics park, an AED90m ($24.5m) expansion that adds roughly 33,445 square metres - about 360,000 square feet - of Grade A warehousing to the estate immediately behind Dubai's main container terminals.
The specification is unglamorous and tells you who the tenants are: customisable units, temperature-controlled warehouses, loading docks, attached offices and, notably, upgraded power capacity to the buildings. That last item is the tell. Free zone warehousing at Jebel Ali is no longer purely storage; a growing share of it is light assembly, repackaging, cold chain and value-added distribution, all of which draw more electricity per square metre than a pallet rack does.
Set against the port itself the sum is trivial. It is nonetheless aimed at the constraint that binds. Jebel Ali handled 15.6 million twenty-foot equivalent units in 2025, which keeps it ninth in the world on Lloyd's List's ranking of container ports, against a nameplate capacity of 19.4 million TEU spread across four terminals, more than 100 berths and some 25 kilometres of quay. The port is running at roughly four-fifths of its rated throughput. What it is shorter of is serviced land behind the fence.
The group numbers give the context. DP World reported revenue of $24.4bn for 2025, up 22 per cent, and adjusted EBITDA of $6.4bn, up 18 per cent at a 26.3 per cent margin, on global throughput of 93.4 million TEU with container volumes across the portfolio up 5.8 per cent. Jebel Ali is a little under a fifth of that container total on its own.
The more interesting figure at Jebel Ali is the mix rather than the total. Origin-and-destination volumes - containers with a genuine local start or finish, as opposed to boxes transhipped between vessels - grew around 9 per cent over the year. O&D cargo is worth considerably more to a terminal operator than transhipment. It pays for gate moves, storage, customs handling and inland transport, it is priced off the shipper's supply chain rather than off a carrier's network decision, and it does not migrate to a rival hub when a shipping alliance reshuffles its rotations.
That cargo comes from the free zone. Jafza hosts more than 11,000 companies and marked its fortieth year in 2025 with a record $190bn of trade, about 15 per cent up on the previous twelve months. The relationship between zone and quay is the whole commercial logic of the site: DP World is not primarily selling crane moves, it is selling a bonded industrial and distribution estate that happens to be attached to a deepwater terminal. Every tenant that takes a warehouse converts into container, breakbulk and vehicle volumes on the water side for as long as the lease runs.
The non-container traffic has been growing faster than the boxes. Breakbulk at Jebel Ali reached 5.67 million tonnes in 2025, including a record 630,000 tonnes in October, the heaviest single month in close to two decades. Breakbulk is project cargo: structural steel, plant modules, cable drums, transformers, drilling equipment and the outsized pieces that will not fit in a container. Volumes of that kind are a direct read on construction and industrial activity across the region the port serves, and they require quay space, heavy-lift gear and laydown area rather than stacking yard. Vehicles told a similar story, with 1.5 million units handled across DP World's Dubai terminals, up 18 per cent.
All of it lands on the same scarce input. Container yards, breakbulk laydown, vehicle compounds and Grade A warehousing compete for the same hectares inside the same customs perimeter, and Jebel Ali's perimeter is finite. That is why an AED90m warehouse phase is a more informative signal than its price tag suggests: the free zone is adding lettable industrial floor space because the demand is there and the alternative - moving tenants outside the zone - breaks the bonded logistics proposition the whole site is built on.
The national policy backdrop points the same way. The UAE has set out to grow its logistics sector to around AED200bn a year within seven years, a target that cannot be met by moving more boxes across the same quay. It requires more warehousing, more cold chain, more light manufacturing inside the zones and more inland distribution capacity, all of which is construction work rather than crane procurement.
For contractors, that is the shape of the Jebel Ali pipeline over the next few years: industrial sheds, chilled and ambient warehousing, substations and internal roads, delivered in phases of a few hundred thousand square feet at a time, rather than another terminal. The quay has headroom. The land behind it does not.