Shanghai's port will be expanded to improve container handling and the approach channels will be deepened to accommodate large container ships, the port director said.
The port's container throughput rose 29 per cent to 1.97 million units last year and should rise by a further 21 per cent to 2.3 million units this year, director Du Deming said.
The aim is to reach three million units by the end of the century but we could surpass that, we are doing the preparatory work to meet this challenge, Du said added.
Shanghai port, China's largest, has been hampered for more than a century by shallow approach channels and silt build-up from the Yangtze river. Despite continual dredging the approaches are only seven metres deep.
We need to deepen the approaches by five metres, through a combination of engineering and dredging, to bring the depth of the approaches to 12.5 metres, Du said.
The plan is to achieve this within the next 10 years. It will be a big project with several phases, he added.
Du declined to estimate the amount of investment required to achieve the plan, saying it was under study.
Water depth is one of our biggest problems. We need to deepen the approaches as soon as possible to allow in the third, fourth and even fifth-generation container ships which can hold 5,000 containers and more, he said.
Fifth-generation container vessels have visited Shanghai, but never fully loaded.
Du said investment in new facilities and reconstruction in Shanghai port would drop somewhat this year below last year's 1.1 billion yuan ($132 million), but that investment would resume growing in 1998. He declined to give details.
He said the port was trying to improve efficiency and had brought average ship turn-around times down to two days last year, a 10 per cent improvement over 1995. We are inevitably competing for business with other ports in the region, and ship owners and cargo owners can make their own choice, he said.
We need to improve facilities, equipment and particularly information systems. But Du said he did not see Shanghai port as competing with Hong Kong, which last year handled 13 million standard containers, more than six times the throughput of Shanghai.
There is not much conflict. China is such a big country that both ports can continue to be prosperous.
Hong Kong basically handles the south of the country, and Shanghai the Yangtze basin, he said.
