The Port Authority of Trinidad and Tobago has won the 2026 NovaPort Cup, finishing ahead of the Grand Port Maritime de la Guyane and the Établissement Portuaire de Saint-Martin. The Grand Port Maritime de la Martinique ranked fourth, giving French overseas ports three consecutive positions immediately behind the Caribbean port award’s latest champion.
Presented during the Port Management Association of the Caribbean’s 2026 Gala Awards, the NovaPort Cup recognises the PMAC member port showing the strongest overall improvement across a combination of operational and financial indicators.
Trinidad and Tobago finished first with 33 points, followed by Guyane with 24 points and Saint-Martin with 18. Martinique placed fourth with 17 points, just one point outside the podium, while the Port Authority of the Cayman Islands completed the top five with 15 points.
A victory built on financial and workforce performance
Trinidad and Tobago’s overall victory was supported by first-place finishes in three of the five performance categories used by PMAC.
The port authority led the rankings for revenue generated per revenue ton, net profit per revenue ton and total staff per revenue ton. Taken together, those results point to a performance profile driven less by cargo growth alone than by revenue efficiency, financial returns and labour productivity.
The Port Authority of Trinidad and Tobago did not lead the category measuring total cargo volumes, which was won by the Montserrat Port Authority. It also finished outside the top five for expenses per revenue ton, a category led by the Port Authority of the Cayman Islands.
The distinction is important because the NovaPort Cup is not designed to identify the port handling the largest absolute volume of cargo. Instead, PMAC places emphasis on improvements recorded over time, allowing ports with different infrastructure, resources and levels of technology to compete within the same framework.
The award therefore provides a broader view of port performance than rankings based exclusively on throughput. Its evaluation model combines activity, revenue generation, cost control, profitability and workforce efficiency.
Guyane emerges as the most consistent challenger
Although the Grand Port Maritime de la Guyane did not finish first in any individual category, it recorded one of the most consistent performances in the competition.
Guyane ranked second for revenue generated per revenue ton and second for expenses per revenue ton. It also placed third for net profit per revenue ton and third for total staff per revenue ton.
Its presence among the top three in four of the five indicators provides the clearest explanation for its second-place finish overall. Rather than depending on a single standout result, the port demonstrated improvement across several financial and organisational measures.
The performance also strengthens Guyane’s position within the wider PMAC port community, where authorities with very different market sizes, cargo profiles and infrastructure conditions are evaluated according to their own progress.
The NovaPort Cup framework makes that distinction explicit: smaller ports are not expected to match the absolute throughput of the region’s largest gateways. Instead, they are assessed on how effectively they improve their own operational and financial performance.
Saint-Martin takes third, with Martinique one point behind
The Établissement Portuaire de Saint-Martin secured third place overall after appearing in the rankings for cargo activity, revenue efficiency and profitability.
Saint-Martin placed fourth for total cargo volumes, third for revenue generated per revenue ton and second for net profit per revenue ton. Its strongest result therefore came in the profitability category, where it finished directly behind Trinidad and Tobago.
The Grand Port Maritime de la Martinique followed in fourth place overall, only one point behind Saint-Martin.
Martinique ranked fifth for revenue generated per revenue ton, third for expenses per revenue ton and second for total staff per revenue ton. Its results suggest that cost management and workforce productivity were central to its overall position.
The strong showing extended beyond the general top four. The Grand Port Maritime de la Guadeloupe also appeared in the workforce productivity ranking, finishing fourth in the total staff per revenue ton category.
Collectively, the results gave French overseas ports a highly visible presence across the 2026 competition. Guyane, Saint-Martin and Martinique occupied the three positions directly below the winner, while Guadeloupe appeared in one of the five individual performance tables.
Measuring more than cargo throughput
The NovaPort Cup uses five key performance indicators.
The first measures total cargo volumes and is intended to reflect growth and operational activity. The second examines total revenue generated per revenue ton, while the third considers total expenses per revenue ton.
The final two indicators measure net profit per revenue ton and total staff per revenue ton, covering financial performance and labour productivity respectively.
According to PMAC’s overview, the combined methodology is intended to encourage benchmarking, promote best practices and support improvements in efficiency and customer service. It also seeks to demonstrate that port excellence can result from management, innovation and financial discipline rather than simply from larger facilities or greater resources.
The award reflects PMAC’s wider objective of strengthening operational and financial efficiency through the sharing of experience, training, information and ideas among Caribbean ports.
However, the published results do not include the underlying cargo, revenue, expenditure, profit or staffing figures. They also do not disclose the precise periods used to measure improvement or provide a complete explanation of how the final scores were calculated.
The results should therefore be understood as a ranking of progress under PMAC’s evaluation model, rather than a comparison of the ports’ absolute financial size, total profitability or overall cargo capacity.
A broader picture of Caribbean port competitiveness
The 2026 NovaPort Cup illustrates how regional port performance is increasingly being assessed through several interconnected measures.
Cargo activity remains important, but it represents only one part of the evaluation. The ability to generate revenue, manage expenditure, improve profitability and use human resources efficiently also shapes the final result.
Trinidad and Tobago’s victory reflects strength across several of those areas. At the same time, the positions secured by Guyane, Saint-Martin and Martinique show that a port does not need to dominate every category to establish itself among the region’s leading performers.
In that sense, the 2026 ranking delivers a wider message for the Caribbean port sector: operational scale alone does not determine progress. Management quality, financial discipline and sustained improvement are becoming equally important measures of regional competitiveness.
