Hong Kong’s CK Hutchison Holdings is selling its two strategically located Panama ports to an investment group led by U.S. asset management firm BlackRock.
The two ports are the Panama Canal’s largest and – according to the Panama Maritime Authority – accounted for 39 percent of the cargo that passed through the canal in 2024.
In recent months, the ports had become a source of tension between the United States, Panama, and China after U.S. President Donald Trump alleged that they represented China’s control of the Panama Canal.
The BlackRock-TiL consortium, which will buy the ports from CK Hutchison subsidiary Hutchison Port Holdings, is made up of BlackRock and Terminal Invesment Limited (TiL), which is owned by MSC, the world’s largest container company. The deal, worth USD 22.8 billion (EUR 20.4 billion), will give BlackRock-TiL a 90 percent controlling stake of Hutchison’s Panama facilities, as well as an 80 percent controlling stake in a further 43 global ports currently controlled by Hutchison.
The sale requires the approval of the Panamanian government.
Despite CK Hutchison Co-Managing Director Frank Sixt saying, in a joint 4 March press release, that the “transaction is purely commercial in nature and wholly unrelated to recent political news reports concerning the Panama Ports,” Trump, among others, have attributed the sale to pressure from his administration.
Bloomberg reported that BlackRock Chairman and CEO Larry Fink had called Trump directly to pitch the deal and received his approval before going forward.
“My administration will be reclaiming the Panama Canal, and we’ve already started doing it,” Trump said in an address to U.S. congress on the evening of 4 March. “Just today, a large American company announced they are buying both ports around the Panama Canal and lots of other things having to do with the Panama Canal and a couple of other canals."
On 5 March, however, Panamanian President Jose Raul Mulino posted a statement to X in which he said “President Trump is lying.“
"The canal is Panamanian and will continue to be Panamanian!” he said.
The Panama Canal is a crucial shipping route which connects the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, with between 13,000 and 14,000 ships passing through yearly. The canal shortens shipping routes between the U.S. East and West coasts, for instance, by at least 16 days.
When water levels dropped in the canal thanks to a historic 2023 drought in Lake Gatun, which feeds it, daily traffic in the Canal slumped to under 40 vessels, and the U.S. shipping industry felt the consequences.
