COSCO Pacific volume down 8 percent in May

Container throughput for the Chinese terminal operator COSCO Pacific contracted 8.3 percent in May, to 3.8 million TEUs.

That’s roughly on pace with COSCO’s volume loss for the first five months of 2009, with throughput down 8.6 percent to 16.5 million TEUs.

COSCO, a subsidiary of the state-owned China Ocean Shipping Co., operates or has a stake in 20 terminals globally, 17 of which are in China. The biggest declines in May came at Shanghai, which saw volume fall 25 percent to 240,000 TEUs and Guangzhou (17 percent drop to 170,000 TEUs).

Also hit hard were two of its foreign terminals, with the joint COSCO-PSA terminal in the Port of Singapore seeing volume decline 49 percent to 58,100 TEUs and Antwerp down 54 percent to 50,300 TEUs.

The bright spots all came in northern Chinese ports -- specifically Qingdao, Tianjin and Yingkou -- which all saw volume increases in May.

Source: American Shipper