8 February 2023 (Lloyd's List) - CONTAINER full-year throughput at ports in China climbed over 4% in 2022 despite the pandemic-led disruptions, although the better-than-expected growth rate is thought to have been inflated. The ranking of the country’s top box ports has also seen clear changes, impacted by shifting trade lanes, draconian lockdown measures and strategies set by different operators. Overall handlings increased 4.7% in 2022 compared with the previous year to nearly 296m teu, according to China’s Ministry of Transport. “The high Chinese port volumes contain some element of throughput inflation as the growth in China was not matched by volumes reported at ports in the rest of the world,” a Linerlytica report said. It attributed part of the increase to double counting of domestic port volumes. "The official port numbers do not provide sufficient visibility to decipher the data," said Linerlytica analyst Hua Joo Tan. "We estimate the total throughput for ports outside China to have declined by 1.1% so it is improbable that actual Chinese volumes could have grown by [over] 4%." There are ways in which ports can boost their handlings without an actual increase in underlying cargo, according to industry experts. One is to encourage the use of barge services to transport cargo from the hinterlands. An export container hauled using road transport to a gateway port and loaded onto a containership directly only generates one teu of throughput. If the box comes from a feeder port on a barge, however, it is then counted as three teu — one move by the feeder port and two moves by the gateway port. If the container is shipped from a river port before it even reaches the coastal feeder port, the overall throughput will be even higher, said a Chinese port analyst. “This is a widely used approach to ramp up port volumes,” said the person, adding that the number of such cases would have increased last year when trucking operations were severely disrupted by strict Covid-control rules. Other measures include swapping empty containers via barges between two nearby terminals at the same port, or simply fabricating results. “But cases of such types have largely decreased in recent years.” Analysis of the key ports, which account for 70% of the global container throughput, shows that most regions have posted a decline or flat growth in volumes last year, with the steepest drop of -6.2% in North Europe, followed by -3.1% in North Asia excluding China, according to Linerlytica. “Full-year volume growth is estimated at 0.4%, driven by the very strong performance at Chinese ports,” it said. Shanghai remains the busiest container port in China as well as in the world with 47.3m teu handled last year. But the 0.6% year-on-year increase marks the second slowest year since 2010. It was only marginally higher than what was seen in 2020 when the global pandemic started. Volume at Ningbo-Zhoushan, the runner-up port, was up 7.3%, partly because of the cargo shifted from Shanghai when the city was on a two-month lockdown between April and May last year. Elsewhere, growth-minded Qingdao replaced Guangzhou, becoming China’s fourth largest box port, while Hong Kong is the only one that recorded a contraction in throughput, of 6.9%, among the top 10 players. Dalian, one of the key shipping hubs in northern China, has seen a decline of box handlings since 2019, with causes including faltering economic growth in the hinterland and a business restructuring resulting from its consolidation with the nearby Yingkou Port. Its volume jumped more than 20% in 2022 after state conglomerate China Merchants took over control of the operations, yet it is still less than half of what was handled in 2018. The Chinese government has yet to publish figures for the first month of this year, which are unlikely to be impressive. The port of Ningbo-Zhoushan, for example, said last week its container throughput slid 2.6% in January from the year-ago period. Industry sources said that storage yards at major ports, such as Shanghai and Shenzhen, had run out of space for the growing piles of empty containers owing to a lack of demand for exports. The reasons behind this include slack demand from large consumer countries, as well as the closing of factories during the extended Chinese New Year holiday, which only ended last weekend in many parts of the country.