The Chinese city of Wuhan, capital of Hubei Province, will launch direct container shipping service to Japan starting November 28.
The route will shorten the turnaround time for shipment of goods which used to be shipped to Shanghai for export, prolonging its transportation cycle to 2-3 days.
Increased demand for direct transport
"As the city's foreign trade burgeoned in recent years and 80 percent of its goods were exported via waterways or airways, opening direct shipping services for export goods are in dire need," the Wuhan New Port Administration Committee said in a statement.
It noted that Wuhan's blueprint of near-sea direct container shipping routes to Japan and the Republic of Korea was put in place as early as three years ago, which prompted the building 500-TEU container vessel for the river-ocean direct shipping services.
"On June 12, Central China Logistics Hanya 1, the tailored container ship for the Wuhan-Japan direct shipping route moved into the water," the port administration noted, saying that the vessel that will operate the route is 125 meters long and 20.8 meters wide with a transport capacity of 7,900-deadweight tons.
Expansion of Europe-Wuhan connection
Wu Shiquan, general manager of COSCO Shipping Lines (Wuhan) Co., Ltd. said that based on Wuhan's multi-model joint transport and Sino-Europe cargo trains, the opening of the direct container shipping service to Japan can optimize the railway-waterway transport channels from near-sea countries to Europe through Wuhan.
It can also better serve the growing shipping demands driven by rapidly developing local trade and trade in central and west China.
The direct container shipping service is planned to be offered once a week, which will be increased upon the operating conditions.
In recent years, Wuhan kept strengthening its role as a transport hub in the upper and middle reaches of the Yangtze River. In 2018, the container throughput of the port of Wuhan exceeded 1.5632 million TEUs, up 15.31% year on year. From January to May of this year, 0.683 million TEUs of container throughput was completed, up 16.01% year on year.
