PORTS of Qingdao, Rizhao, Yantai and Weihai in eastern China's Shandong province have signed a strategic alliance charter with South Korea's port of Busan on cooperating on developing a logistics and shipping hub in northeast Asia, Xinhua reports.
The charter proposed that the five ports offer priority on flights, ships and cargo clearance to each other to boost international container transshipment and to improve trans-border door-to-door delivery, also to simulate the cooperation between Shandong's bonded port area and Busan's free trade zone.
The five ports agreed that they should focus on Sino-Korean sea-land intermodal transportation to optimise logistics practices and boost region economic growth, and that they should lay stress on application of green technologies and on enhancement of port operation efficiency to reduce cost.
The five ports will develop an annual joint conference mechanism to secure the smooth implementation of the charter. The ports will also set up a group of contact to strengthen their exchange.
Shandong province's port throughput totalled to 925 million tonnes last year, ranking the second in China. Busan is the largest container port in Korea with a throughput of 14.18 million TEU in 2010, taking up 74 per cent of the country's total.
