After more than two years’ construction, Qingdao is emerging as an international shipping center. The Qingdao shipping industry made breakthroughs in transformation and upgrades amid shipping environment improvement. Statistics shows that in 2016 the Qingdao shipping capacity reached 6.597 million tons with 514,000 tons added; the city has another 20 marine container shipping routes added, the total number increased to 172. Marine port cargo throughput and container throughput reached 0.51 billion tons and 18.05 million respectively.
The Qingdao Municipal Government has established the Qingdao international shipping service center at the end of 2014. The center focuses on serving the whole shipping industry chain of Qingdao. It fully shows its 4 main functions, to gathering shipping resource elements, communicating shipping dynamic information, regulating shipping exchange activities, and stirring shipping market energy. The center also will explore 4 innovations, including service mode, trade finance, cooperation mechanism, and theory research to integrated development of mid and upstream industries. According to Luo Hao, the center director, in the over 2 years after the center was established, the center gives full support to the development of high level industries such as shipping finance, shipping exchanges, and shipping consultancy. The center opens the port Big Data era through the way of combining Internet + shipping. The center also implements the Internationalization strategy to leverage building an international functional platform as the chance of building international shipping center and hub port. (Zhou Jianliang)
