A panoramic view of the Yueqing Bay in Wenzhou Port Area. [Photo provided to ezhejiang.gov.cn]
Wenzhou, a coastal city in East China's Zhejiang province, is planning to develop itself into a more dynamic and omnipotent commercial port city in the next five years.
Wenzhou had in 2004 set a goal of vitalizing its commercial sector and port industry as the cargo and container throughput of ports in the city reached 26.3 million tons and 210,000 TEUs respectively. The city then expected that it would by 2015 see the total cargo and container throughput at all its ports reach 100 million tons and 3 million TEUs respectively.
In 2020, however, Wenzhou's container throughput was only 1 million TEUs. A year later, the figure rose to 1.036 million TEUs with the corresponding annual cargo throughput reaching 79.8 million tons.
The city has since realized that becoming more open is the only way forward. It has hence rolled out a port development plan for the next five years which aims to raise total container throughput at all local ports to 2.2 million TEUs by 2026.
The city will focus on the establishment of an integrated sea-land-air logistics network with an annual cargo handling capacity of 100 million tons, a commerce port for foreign trade, a financial port that facilitates cross-border investment and financing and gathers foreign and private capital, a port adept in digital trade and financing, and a headquarters port that would be attractive to enterprises run by overseas Chinese.
The Wenzhou Global Commodity Trading Port is a hub of foreign trade. [Photo/WeChat account: iwenzhou]
