Shanghai International Port Group (SIPG) yesterday announced it will slash shipment transfer fees at the city's Yangshan Deepwater Port to try to encourage more big foreign ships to anchor there.

For overseas and domestic ships transferred to the port, loading and unloading fees (part of the transfer fee) will be lowered by 20 percent. The same charge will be cut by half for cargo coming from the Yangtze River, according to Chen Xuyuan, president of the SIPG.

Since the first-phase of the port opened in December, the SIPG has operated a service transporting freight between the city's Waigaoqiao Port and the new Yangshan Port. Chen said international containers which use that service will not have to pay the loading and unloading fee.

Such policies will be effective from today. Chen estimated the moves will help to cut the overall costs of shippers by at least 30 percent and also save them time.

Problems emerged during the first 150 days of operation of the new port, the largest in China. Some of these problems concerned high logistic costs as the area is a long way from downtown. Officials also admitted that many supporting facilities and public services in the port area are still not available.

Chen said the new moves are expected to solve those problems and make the port more efficient and cheaper to run, compared to Waigaoqiao Port.

The Yangshan Deepwater Port is still under construction. It is located on Xiaoyangshan Island at the mouth of Hangzhou Bay in Zhejiang Province.

The first phase has five berths covering 1,600 metres of dock frontage and has handled about 1.06 million TEUs (20-foot equivalent units), the SIPG announced yesterday. More than 80 percent of the containers handled were from foreign ships.

Chen said he was quite confident the port would achieve its designed handling capacity for the first phase of three million TEUs by the end of the year.

"Our ultimate goal is to turn Yangshan Deepwater Port into a shipping hub and a key transshipment centre in the world. The city is also designed to be a global shipping centre," Chen said.

He said there are also plans to add more water routes directly linking up to the Yangtze River and East Sea and strengthen co-operation between the Yangshan port with ports along the middle-lower reaches of the river.

The Yangshan port project is expected to be completed by 2012. It should eventually have a container capacity of 15 million TEUs, with more than 30 berths.

The second phase of the project is due to be finished and become operational at the end of this year, which will expand the port's handling capacity to more than five million TEUs.

(China Daily May 11, 2006)