DP World’s Jebel Ali Port in Dubai, UAE, handled the terminal's largest-ever bulk carrier vessel -- Saba Shipping’s ‘Mega Star’ -- recently.

It measured quarter of a kilometre long at 229 metres and carried around 79,000 tonnes of reinforcing steel from Turkey, said the Emirates News Agency (WAM) report.

"Our flagship Jebel Ali Port serves a huge variety of customers, all to the same extremely high standard. The team in Jebel Ali rose to the challenge of handling the biggest ever vessel of its type to visit the port, and I congratulate them on their achievement,” Sultan Ahmed Bin Sulayem, chairman of DP World, was quoted as saying.

The port received the first scheduled vessel to call at its new Container Terminal 3 last month, as it gears up to serve customers at the state-of-the-art facility, said the report.

Once fully operational next year, the terminal will add a further four million TEU (twenty-foot equivalent container units) capacity to the port, taking total handling capacity at Jebel Ali to 19 million TEU, it said.

DP World’s UAE terminals have handled 11.4 million TEU in the first nine months of the year, representing growth of 12.6 per cent year-on-year, it added.