SAGT: Quarter century of maritime excellence with safety at core

South Asia Gateway Terminals (SAGT), a trailblazer in Sri Lanka’s contemporary port and maritime history, celebrates its Silver Jubilee this year, marking a quarter of a century of success, growth, and resilience. 

Established in 1999 as the first public-private partnership container terminal operator in the Port of Colombo, SAGT has, over the past 25 years, consistently set the benchmark in all aspects by facilitating global trade to and through the South Asia region with world-class operational excellence. 

Since its inception, SAGT has been at the forefront of reshaping container terminal operations in Sri Lanka. The initial years saw the transformation of the historic Queen Elizabeth Quay into a modern, state-of-the-art facility equipped with advanced technology and infrastructure and, growing from that, providing customer-centric solutions to the international container shipping community is deeply ingrained in the company’s ethos, to date.

Sustainable, customer-centred operational excellence with safety at its core remains the foundation of SAGT’s success. The terminal has consistently delivered high performance to its customers and stakeholders, earning global recognition through numerous awards for best practices. This commitment to excellence is evident in its highly skilled and motivated staff, coupled with investment in advanced IT networks, real-time tracking and monitoring systems, web-based e-port solutions, and safety management and ERP systems, all of which ensure that customers receive a reliable and world-class service. In this way, SAGT has played a pivotal role in positioning the Port of Colombo as the primary transshipment hub in the region.

Being one of the five values at SAGT, Safety is at the epicentre of SAGT’s business operations. The safety and wellbeing of all employees, contractors, visitors, and other stakeholders are a key organisational priority with no compromise at any cost. Health and safety is embedded across the organisation as a core value, and workplace safety encompasses the daily and long-term wellbeing of all employees and other stakeholders. The company’s comprehensive safety policies and practices are benchmarked to international best practices at container terminals around the globe that, in all instances, exceed local statutory requirements. 

SAGT strives for zero accidents in the workplace by fostering a culture attuned to maintaining the highest safety standards. The company’s Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) Committee works in collaboration with all stakeholders to reduce work-related injuries, work-related illness, incidents, and accidents, and environmentally unsound practices.

The company places emphasis on the training and development of employees, which is seen as key to maintaining a safety-centric workplace. Recurrent training in the form of daily tool-box meetings, competency and skills refresher courses, and formal sessions through an annual calendar formulated following an evaluation of the training needs of each employee and third party contractors working within the terminal premises is planned and implemented on a structured, ongoing basis. Beyond this, the company also conducts awareness sessions for employees and contractors using internal and external resource persons on a variety of topics, including mental and physical wellbeing. 

The company continues to invest in infrastructure and equipment to enable a safe working environment. SAGT was the first, and to date remains the only, terminal at the Port of Colombo to invest in safety cages for lashing operations. The company also introduced a hazardous cargo bay to manage leaking hazardous cargo in a safe and environmentally sustainable manner. In 2023, SAGT was recognised as the winner in the Transport and Logistics large scale category at the National Occupational Safety and Health Excellence Awards 2022.

The latest addition to SAGT’s suite of safety measures, protocols, and tools is the “Safety Management System”, an HSE application. The application is a collaborative platform which enables identification and accurate classification of risks and hazards in terminal operations via visual aids. Further, the application will be upgraded in the near future as a knowledge management and communication platform for users.