Qingdao Port News

On July 2, COSCO Shipping Bulk's 400,000-ton ore carrier Yuanyihai successfully completed what the company claims is the fasters unloading of iron ore in the world.The unloading operation took place in Dongjiakou Port Area of Qingdao Port. It took only 30.7 hours to complete the unloading of 375,500 tons of cargo.COSCO Shipping Bulk coordinated with the port to formulate a plan to speed up the unloading and arranged for the representative of COSCO Shipping Bulk Beijing Branch in Qingdao and the ship’s crew to cooperate on the effort.After the Yuanyihai berthed…

China's eastern port city Qingdao is experiencing the worst ever algae infestation in the region, with more than 1,700 square km of coastal area blanketed by harmful green seaweed, also known as "green tide." Qingdao has suffered from algae for 15 years. It normally appears from late spring and lasts for three to four months, damaging the local marine ecosystem as algae take oxygen from other organisms and churn out toxic odors while decaying. More than 1 million tonnes of algae are expected to be removed from coastal waters…

Work to siphon off the remaining cargo from a stricken tanker was expected to commence on Friday, the vessel's manager said on Thursday, two days after hundreds of tonnes of oil spilled into the Yellow Sea following a collision in dense fog.The size of the spill from the Liberia-flagged tanker A Symphony was revised down to about 400 tonnes (2,920 barrels) on Thursday, from the original estimate of 500 tonnes, and one Chinese maritime official said it seemed to have been contained.A…

Chinese officials were waiting for better weather before deciding whether to siphon off the remaining cargo from a stricken tanker after hundreds of tonnes of oil spilled into the Yellow Sea after a collision in dense fog two days ago.The size of the spill from the Liberia-flagged tanker A Symphony was revised down to about 400 tonnes (2,920 barrels) on Thursday, from the original estimate of 500 tonnes, and one maritime official said it seemed to have been contained.An official at the Shandong Maritime Safety Administration told Reuters the amount of oil on the tanker…

A tanker carrying around one million barrels of oil products was involved in a collision near the Chinese port city of Qingdao, spilling oil into the Yellow Sea, China's Shandong Maritime Safety Administration and tanker representatives said on Tuesday.The collision involving anchored Liberia-flagged tanker A Symphony and the Sea Justice took place at 0850 local time (0050 GMT), A Symphony's manager Goodwood Ship Management said in an e-mail."The force of the impact on the forward port side caused a breach in cargo tanks and ballast tanks…

Iran has asked Indonesia to provide details about the seizure of an Iranian-flagged vessel, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh said on Monday, a day after Jakarta said it had seized Iran and Panama-flagged tankers in its waters.Indonesia said on Sunday its coast guard had seized the Iranian-flagged MT Horse and the Panamanian-flagged MT Freya vessels over suspected illegal oil transfer in the country’s waters.Khatibzadeh said that the seizure was over a “a technical issue and it happens in shipping field”.“Our Ports Organisation and the ship owner company are looking to find the cause of the issue and resolve it,” Khatibzadeh told a televised weekly news conference.Coast guard spokesman Wisnu Pramandita said the tankers…

In June, the United States imposed sanctions on half a dozen oil tankers managed by established shipping firms. It was a major escalation of American attempts to choke off Venezuela’s oil trade.Within weeks, a little-known company based in the United Arab Emirates took over management of several tankers that had been shipping Venezuelan oil. The vessels got new names. And then they resumed transporting Venezuelan crude.The company, Muhit Maritime FZE, is one of three UAE-based entities identified by Reuters that have shipped Venezuelan crude and fuel during the second half of this year. Their role emerges from an examination of internal shipping documents from Venezuela’s state oil company as well as third-party shipping and vessel tracking data.

Chinese ports are struggling to unload record volumes of crude with storage tanks full after the country rushed to buy extra barrels during April's oil price crash, according to traders and shipping data seen by Reuters.More than 80 million barrels of crude oil are currently waiting to be discharged from tankers in Chinese ports, Refinitiv Eikon data showed.Half of those are at the Qingdao port area in Shandong province, where the waiting time is two-three weeks or sometimes even longer…

The international container terminal operating company APM Terminals (APMT) said it has opened a new container terminal in Vado Ligure, on the Italian Riviera, which will be capable of handling 900,000 TEUs of containerized cargo.APMT has a 50.1% share in the “Vado Gateway,” while Cosco Shipping Ports has a 40% share and Qingdao Port International has a 9.9% share. APMT said the project is part of the “New Silk Road.” Chinese firms have invested in more than a dozen European ports in recent years.Vado Gateway is the most important port infrastructure development in Italy over the last decades and the result of a 450-million-euro investment.The terminal was commissioned by Autorità di Sistema Portuale del Mar Ligure Occidentale (Western Ligurian Sea System Port Authority)…

China-based Qingdao Port International Development has agreed to purchase a 33% stake in COSCO Shipping Ports (Abu Dhabi), a deepwater terminal located in Khalifa Port, for US$59m.Abu Dhabi Terminal is a joint venture company established in the United Arab Emirates.The investment, which will be made through Qingdao Port's Hong Kong subsidiary QDP International Development, will give the port operator a 30 percent holding in the CSP Abu Dhabi Terminal at Khalifa Port in which the Hong Kong-based firm holds a 90 percent stake, Qingdao Port said in a press release.As of the date of announcement, its remaining equity of 10% owned by an independent third party.

The 23,656 teu MSC Isabella became the largest containership to call the Port of Singapore when it berthed on 10 November 2019.The MSC’s Gülsün-Class of container vessels is currently the world’s largest series of container ships.To date, MSC Isabella is the biggest container ship to call at Singapore, the world’s top transshipment hub. Measuring around 400 meters long and 61 meters wide, the ship can carry up to 24 rows of containers, with a height of 13 tiers on deck. Its total capacity is 23,656 TEU (Twenty-foot Equivalent Units). Its length exceeds that of the Eiffel Tower and it can transport the equivalent of about 384 million pairs of shoes.Singapore is the ship’s first port-of-call in Asia after sailing back from Europe. The ship was delivered to MSC in August 2019.

Oil major BP on Tuesday offloaded about 1 million barrels of Angolan crude from supertanker Olympic Light to an independent Chinese refiner after holding the oil at sea for about three months, people with knowledge of the discharge said on Wednesday.The oil had been aboard one of four supertankers held up or delayed off China's east coast near Shandong since as long ago as April, unable to discharge BP's oil due to slowing buying from private refiners in the world's second-biggest economy.All four have delayed cargoes, totaling about 4 million barrels, have now been offloaded to Shandong Qingyuan Group, one of China's largest independently run lubricant producers…

The seaborne iron ore market appears to be in something of a sweet spot currently, with largely steady demand and prices that have been flatlining for the past couple of months. Of course, another way of saying that a market is enjoying relatively stable and good times is that it's boring, but in iron ore there is plenty of action bubbling beneath the seemingly calm exterior. It's not so much that iron ore prices or volumes are expected to shift dramatically in the coming months, it's more that structural changes in the world's biggest importer, China, are re-shaping how the industry works.

Australia's Port Hedland iron ore terminal will likely reopen on Saturday after Australia's weather bureau cut the forecast strength of a cyclone bearing down on the continent's far northwest, the port's operator said on Friday. Cyclone Joyce, a Category 1 storm, is holding just off the beaches of Pilbara iron ore belt, prompting the overnight closure of the world's biggest iron ore export terminal, 1,700 km (1,050 miles) north of Perth, as a safety precaution. Shipping operations are expected to resume at 6 a.m. Saturday (2200 GMT Friday) should weather conditions improve. The port accounts for over half of Australia's iron ore exports, handling more than a million tonnes a day from the Pilbara iron belt, the majority bound for Chinese steel mills.

APM Terminals Vado, Italy Managing Director Paolo Cornetto highlighted the future role of the deepwater APM Terminals Vado facility, now under construction, as a new southern gateway to Central Europe. “We designed our new port around liner customers - and our landside customers – the importers, exporters and truckers - to help them do more business by tapping into the 70 million-member consumer market of northern Italy, southern Germany, Switzerland, Austria and eastern France within an eight hour proximity of our port," he said. "We will offer a fully-automated gate complex – the first of any Italian port - to get truckers in and out faster and safer.

PetroChina is this week unloading the first Chinese purchase of crude oil from U.S. strategic petroleum reserves at a port in eastern China, according to shipping data and two industry sources. The move comes as China, the world's No.2 oil consumer, steps up imports from the Americas to diversify supply sources. PetroChina unit, PetroChina International America Inc, bought the 550,000-barrel cargo of Bryan Mound sour crude in a sale from U.S. strategic petroleum reserves in March for $28.8 million. Supertanker Cosrising Lake <C}KV7309834335>, chartered by PetroChina, is unloading the U.S. oil at Qingdao port in Shandong province this week, shipping data on Thomson Reuters Eikon showed. The crude has an API gravity of 33.3 degrees and sulphur content of 1.41 percent, according to the U.S.

COSCO Shipping Ports and Qingdao Port International (QPI) announced to enter into the Transaction Agreement, pursuant to which COSCO Shipping Ports will make strategic investment in QPI. Taking the proposed New H Share Issurance plan of QPI into consideration, the Subscription Shares will represent approximately 16.82% of the issued share capital of QPI, and COSCO Shipping Ports’ shareholding in QPI will increase to approximately 18.41% in total. Shanghai China Shipping Terminal Development Co., Ltd. (SCSTD), a wholly-owned subsidiary of COSCO Shipping Ports, will subscribe for 1,015,520,000 non-circulating domestic shares in QPI at a total consideration of approximately RMB 5.8 billion (equivalent to RMB5.71 per share)…

Tankers at Qingdao port face up to 30-day wait. At least 15 large tankers wait to offload -shiptracking data. A surge in oil buying by China's newest crude importers has created delays of up to a month for vessels to offload cargoes at Qingdao port, imposing costly fees and complicating efforts to sell to the world's hottest new buyers. China's independent refiners, freed of government constraints after securing permission to import just last year, have gorged on plentiful low-cost crude in 2016. This has created delays for tankers that have quadrupled to between 20 to 30 days at Qingdao port in Shandong province, the key import hub for the plants, known as teapots, according to port agents and ship-tracking data.

APM Terminals’ increased invested capital to USD $6.2 billion in 2015 as ongoing strategic plans to drive portfolio growth, improve productivity and safety performance, generated USD $4.2 billion in revenue, and a profit for the year of USD $654 million. Portfolio throughput weighted by equity share was 36 million TEUs for 2015, and when not including the divestment or exit of operations in Houston, Jacksonville, and Charleston, USA and a share in the Med-Center Terminal in Gioia Tauro, Italy, volume declined 1.1% from the year prior, while the overall global container market grew by 1.3%. Lower oil prices in 2015 affected APM Terminals bottom line, as reduced oil revenue resulted in declines in import cargo into oil producing countries in West Africa, Russia and Brazil.

About 4 million barrels of crude oil bought by a Chinese state trader for the country's strategic reserves have been stranded in two tankers off an eastern port for nearly two months due to a lack of storage. The delays will cost millions of dollars and indicate how China is struggling to import record amounts of crude if storage and port capacity at Qingdao, its largest oil import terminal, are unable to keep pace. Ocean Lily and Plata Glory, two very large crude carriers (VLCCs) carrying oil for Sinochem Corp, arrived at Huangdao, Qingdao's main oil terminal, in early September, and both were still at anchor this week, waiting to unload, according to Reuters' shipping data, and trade and port sources.

The APM Terminals Global Terminal Network will enter China’s fastgrowing grain import market as part of a joint venture with Qingdao Port International, continuing APM Terminals’ ongoing expansion into port and terminal operations outside containerised cargo handling. The newly developed Qingdao Port Dongjiakou Multi-Purpose Terminal, in which APM Terminals will hold a 20% share, is located on China’s Bohai Rim in the Shandong province, on the Yellow Sea. The Port of Qingdao is one of the world’s busiest ports,ranking seventh globally handling a total of 468 million metric tons in 2014. Qingdao’s new Dongjiakou Port area is set to become a national hub of Chinese bulk and energy cargos, with a projected volume of more than 300 million metric tons handled annually in this new complex.

Leaders from Qingdao Port Group met with APM Terminals executives in The Hague to sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) for the APM Terminals Vado, Italy port project. Terms and investment amount were not disclosed. The MOU will create a new joint venture to invest in and work with other potential partners. APM Terminals Vado is a new terminal in northern Italy, which when opened in January 2018 will handle both containerized and liquid bulk cargoes – and integrated operationally with the existing 275,000 annual TEU capacity Vado Reefer Terminal facility, which was acquired by APM Terminals in August 2015. The Italian government is providing EUR 300 million for civil works for the project.

Qingdao Port International Co., Ltd and Svitzer Asia last signed a joint venture agreement last week in an effort to pool resources for future growth, establishing Qingdao Port Svitzer Towage Ltd to operate and manage towage services in the port. Qingdao Port International Co., Ltd is the main operator of Qingdao Port. “Establishing Qingdao Port Svitzer Towage Ltd is part of Svitzer’s ambition to grow in Asia, and will be the first operation of its kind for Svitzer in China,” said Alan Bradley, Regional Managing Director of Asia. Chief Commercial Officer, Kasper Friis Nilaus added, “This joint venture supports our global growth strategy by delivering towage services with high standards in safety and operational reliability, as well as providing advanced towage solutions at Qingdao Port.