Trade LanesLive channel

The world's busiest ports are Asian

Seven of the eight busiest container ports are in China and Singapore. Here is how the boxes are counted.

· 1:02 · Narrated by Nora Lindqvist, trade and shipping correspondent (synthetic voice)

Transcript

  1. Seven of the world's eight busiest container ports are in China and Singapore.
  2. Container traffic is counted in twenty-foot equivalent units, or T E U: the size of one standard shipping box.
  3. By that measure, the busiest ports in the world are overwhelmingly Asian.
  4. Shanghai leads. Its port handled forty-nine point two million TEU in twenty twenty-three, more than any other port.
  5. Six of the top eight are in mainland China: Shanghai, Ningbo-Zhoushan, Qingdao, Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Tianjin.
  6. Singapore, in second place, is the busiest transhipment hub: a port where boxes change ships, rather than leave the port.
  7. The only port in the top eight outside China and Singapore is Busan, in South Korea, with twenty-three million TEU in twenty twenty-three.
  8. This has been Trade Lanes, from The North China Times.

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