(Yicai Global) Nov. 29 -- The Shanghai Shipping Exchange and Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing have penned a cross-sector agreement in a bid to internationalize the Chinese mainland's shipping price indexes.

The pair penned the deal yesterday and will cooperate in market research, product development and marketing to execute their plan, the Shanghai exchange said on WeChat.

China's Ministry of Transport and the Shanghai municipal government founded the Shanghai Shipping Exchange in 1996. It is the country's only state-level exchange of its kind and carries out three main functions: regulating shipping transactions, maintaining market fairness, and publishing up-to-date information on the sector.

Shanghai Shipping Freight Trading, which the exchange controls, launched container freight derivatives from Shanghai to Europe and from the United States to Spain in 2011, providing a trading platform for container carriers to check prices and hedge against risk.

Editor: James Boynton