China’s Ningbo port has made improvements to its port transport and production through the acceleration of its transformation into a modern logistics port, reports said.

Ningbo’s sea-rail transport container volume exceeded 50,000 teu for the first time from the start of this year until 5 June, up over 20% over the same period of last year, putting the port as the number one port in South China for sea-rail transport.

By the end of May, Ningbo achieved container throughput of 7.63m teu, up 12.1% year-on-year, ranking first in all the domestic ports in terms of growth.

In the past, the majority of the containers transported via Ningbo port came from cities in the province. While local foreign trade economy and annual growth of port throughput were considered strong, problems of inadequate origin area and container amount remained.

In a bid to change the situation, Ningbo Port Group has been trying to break the geographic limitations to expand the trade space in the past years.

By end-January 2014, the bi-directional train for sea-rail transport from Ningbo to Xinjiang was opened, realising the 100% bi-directional transport between the two areas.

In addition, expansion was made into inland market through strengthening the dry port layout, and allowing the sea-rail transport to optimise the product source structure of Ningbo port.

To date, through joint efforts with local governments, Ningo port has set up dry ports in nine cities in Zhejiang province and Shangrao and Yingtan of Jiangxi province and Xiangyang of Hubei province.