YANTIAN Port served more than 50 ships and handled nearly 210,000 twenty-foot equivalent unites (TEUs) from Feb. 1 to Sunday, Shenzhen Economic Daily reported yesterday.

The port area was bustling with activity Tuesday, with many large ships berthing in, shore cranes working in shifts, containers being placed in order, and trucks shuttling back and forth, said the Daily.

Yantian Port, which had suffered a severe setback due to the pandemic, remained resilient in 2021. Throughout the year, the port added 13 new shipping routes, bringing the total number of weekly routes to 106, with the port’s operation and density ranking first in South China.

The port’s container throughput saw a 6.1 percent year-on-year increase in 2021, surpassing 14.16 million TEUs. Yantian’s yearly container throughput has accounted for at least half of Shenzhen Port’s total for more than 20 consecutive years.

The port has become an economic trade and development “stabilizer” for the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Areas and even the whole South China region. It operates a container every two seconds and serves more than one-third of Guangdong Province’s imports and exports, the Daily said.

The construction in Yantian Port’s east operation area’s automated terminal started Dec. 8, 2021, and the world’s first 200,000-ton fully automated container terminal will be built in the port.

Although Yantian Port has resumed accepting export laden container gate-in seven days before a vessel’s ETA (estimated time of arrival), the export laden container reservation limit will remain at 12,000 TEUs per day, and the terminals will continue to operate at high load for the foreseeable future, according to the Daily report.

Meanwhile, to prevent COVID-19 outbreaks, the port has strictly implemented closed-loop management for boarding operators and its closed-loop management area currently has 1,300 staffers.

(Zhang Yu)