(Yicai Global) Aug. 11 -- Denmark’s Maersk, France’s CMA CGM, Taiwan’s Evergreen Marine Corp. and Italy’s Mediterranean Shipping Company are among the international transportation firms working with the Shanghai International Port Group to set up an empty container station at the city’s deep-water port to help better distribute containers in the northeast Asian region.

The empty container transportation hub, which will include a 450,000 square-meter area for container storage, will transform Yangshan Deep Water Port into a core center for the transfer of empty containers, SIPG President Yan Jun said yesterday. 

A severe shortage of containers brought on by ships piled high with goods leaving China and then failing to return due to a lack of export orders in other countries during the Covid-19 pandemic, has stymied the international freight shipping sector and caused prices to soar. 

The center will co-ordinate between liners to store and allocate empty containers according to their needs to try to rectify the imbalance between incoming and outgoing containers and improve their turnover efficiency.

SIPG is also planning to construct more sub-centers along inland river ports to help with the storage of the empty containers.  “We hope that these wharves can help clients find the closest empty containers,” said Chen Wei, the assistant general manager at SIPG’s Operation and Business Department.

The station will offer various supporting services to shippers in order to get them to choose Shanghai as their port of choice for the bulk transfer of empty containers, Chen added. 

Already the biggest cargo terminal in the world, Yangshan port is expected to have a throughput of 23 million twenty-foot equivalent units this year which will reach 26 million by 2025.

Editors: Tang Shihua, Kim Taylor