Express maritime shipping service between Taiwan and China keeps booming due to the rise in the e-commerce business, Taiwan Ports International Corp’s (TIPC) said this week.
Company statistics showed that 35.37 million kilograms of cargo were delivered through express services during the first half of this year, already surpassing 32.42 million kilograms last year.
The cargo volume is expected to grow during the third and fourth quarters due to the thriving online shopping market, the company said.
TIPC’s Keelung branch president Stephen Liu (劉詩宗) said that while cross-strait ferry services have been suspended since February because of the COVID-19 pandemic, cross-strait cargo shipping services have continued to thrive.
“The air cargo service is growing at a faster rate and has a relatively shorter delivery time, but the delivery cost is higher. By contrast, the duration of the cargo shipping service from the Port of Taipei to the port in Pingtan in China’s Fujian Province is about three to four hours, only slightly longer than the air cargo service, he said.
As the maritime shipping cost is cheaper, many e-commerce platform operators opt to deliver items through the maritime transport service as well,” Liu said.
Chinese e-commerce operators such as Taobao.com and Taiwan-based operators PCHome Online and Eastern Home Shopping & Leisure Co (ET-Mall) have chosen to deliver a large quantity of their items through the cross-strait express shipping service, TIPC chairman Lee Hsien-yi (李賢義) said.
Some of the logistics firms have also planned to expand their warehousing facilities in the Port of Taipei in view of rising service demand, Lee said.
The nation’s cross-strait express shipping service, which was launched in 2015, delivered mainly agricultural products and seafood during its first years of operation, the company said.
As online shopping has increasingly become popular, the products transported through the servic include consumer goods, from underwear to pet toys, it said.
Despite the growing volume at the Port of Taipei, the nation’s five largest international commercial ports — Keelung, Taipei, Taichung, Kaohsiung and Hualien — have seen total container throughput decline by nearly 9 percent during the first half of this year due to the pandemic, the company said.
The decrease of traffic in the Port of Kaohsiung exceeded 10 percent, the largest among the five, it said, adding that the volume is expected to pick up during the second half of this year with the easing of COVID-19 in China.
Large shipping firms have reduced container and bulk cargo shipping services during the first two quarters, while increasingly transiting goods through the Port of Xiamen in China, which reduces the cargo volume at the Port of Kaohsiung, he said.
“The pandemic in China may have slightly eased, but several countries in Southeast Asia continue to keep their seaports closed to contain the spread of the disease, he said.
“The performance of the maritime shipping service in the second half of this year would depend on the COVID-19 situation in other countries, which have seen no sign of easing,” he said.
“We will upgrade port facilities and expedite the handling of containers in all seaports to attract berthing of more large container ships,” he added.
‘EFFECTIVE DETERRENCE’: If the Biden administration suspends arms sales to Taiwan, the military could still ready a nimble fighting force for defense, an analyst said The “US Strategic Framework for the Indo-Pacific” last week sparked debate among analysts after US President Donald Trump declassified the document 20 years ahead of schedule. Trump on Tuesday last week released the document that had governed US strategic action in the region since the US leader approved its use in 2018. The document, which outlines US priorities in the region, emphasizes the importance of defending Taiwan against military aggression and facilitating the country’s development of asymmetric strategies and capabilities. The overall directive of the document is for the US to prevent China from establishing sustained air and sea dominance inside the first
SECOND RULING: Israeli-American Oren Shlomo Mayer refused to sign a court transcript, complained about the court translator and said the trial had been unfair The High Court yesterday upheld New Taipei City District Court’s verdicts on four men convicted last year in connection with the 2018 murder and dismemberment of a Canadian citizen on the banks of the Sindian River (新店溪). It found American-Israeli Oren Shlomo Mayer and American Ewart Odane Bent guilty of homicide and the abandonment and destruction of a corpse, with Mayer sentenced to life in prison and Bent given a term of 12 years and six months, for the death of Sanjay Ryan Ramgahan, whose body parts were found in a riverside park under Zhongzheng Bridge in New Taipei’s Yonghe
ALLEVIATING FEARS: The CECC would only announce public places where it is difficult to identify everyone there at the same time as the couple, minister Chen said The Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) yesterday announced six places where two locally infected COVID-19 cases had visited between Thursday last week and Sunday, urging people who had been at the places at the same time to monitor their health. The couple, cases 838, a doctor, and 839, his nurse girlfriend, were reported by the center on Tuesday. The doctor had treated a patient with COVID-19 last week before he began suffering symptoms on Friday, while the nurse began suffering symptoms on Saturday. They work in the same hospital in northern Taiwan, but the nurse had not worked with COVID-19 patients, so
A lawyer and a prosecutor yesterday castigated what they called a lenient ruling by the High Court on Luo Wen-shan (羅文山), whose prison sentence was reduced to two years, which he does not need to serve, after he was convicted for receiving illegal political donations from China to meddle in Taiwan’s elections. Investigators found that Luo, who retired from the army with the rank of lieutenant general, had accepted NT$8.38 million (US$294,604 at the current exchange rate) under the guise of political contributions from Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference member Xu Zhiming (許智明) and people in Hong Kong from 2008 to