Container traffic at the Port of Kaohsiung from January to last month reached 8.64 million twenty-foot-equivalent units (TEUs), an increase of 1.65 percent from a year earlier, Taiwan International Ports Corp said on Thursday.
Among the containers handled at the port in the period, 4.74 million were export or import cargo, an annual increase of 5.8 percent, the company said.
The volume of transshipments from July to last month also rose 3.9 percent, it added.
The port company estimated that container traffic would this year again reach 10 million TEUs, saying that the facility has handled more than 10 million TEUs annually since 2014.
The company said the increase in container traffic was due to a shuffle and consolidation by the world’s three major container ship industry alliances — Ocean Alliance, THE Alliance and 2M Alliance — that started in April last year following the bankruptcy of South Korea’s Hanjin Shipping.
Other alliances have also adjusted trade routes, it added.
The port’s transshipment volume slid last year, because the alliances opened direct shipping routes from Southeast Asian countries to North America, it said.
“All the container shipping firms have completed the adjustment of trade routes by this year, which in turn has helped stabilize container traffic at the Port of Kaohsiung,” the company said.
The volume of export and import cargo containers at the port has increased over the past 10 months, because the IMF had previously estimated that the global economic growth rate would reach 3.9 percent in the first half of this year, the company said, adding that a trade war between China and the US has also caused some companies to ship their goods earlier than usual, which boosted the volume of cargo containers.
The company said it has taken a series of measures to build up steady sources of cargo, improve its capacity to handle cargo container transshipments and use the port as an operational base, including the construction of new facilities to enhance service efficiency at the terminals and operating with diverse and innovate business models.
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