The Chinese Communications Minister Li Shenglin has revealed the government has a policy aimed at creating two new port ''clusters'' to add to the three existing ones centred on Shanghai, Shenzhen and Tianjin.
APM Terminals, CMA-CGM, DP World, ETA, ICTS, Gammon Infrastructure, IL&FS, GVK, Soma Enterprises and Concor are all interested in bidding.
One cluster will be located in southern Fujian on the mainland side of the Taiwan Straits, where container traffic will be concentrated at the ports of Fuzhou, Quanzhou and Putian. According to Li, this cluster will be a key component in developing free trade relations with Taiwan.
The second cluster will be built at Hainan in southern Guangdong, where Zhanjiang, Fangcheng and Haikou are expected to generate considerable box traffic in addition to the aforementioned Hainan. Both clusters are needed to enable China to implement its 2006-2010 social and economic development programme. Li also commented that container throughput would grow from 74.41 million TEUs in 2005 to 130 million TEUs in 2010.
