Aerial photo taken on Nov 3, 2021 shows a container dock of Yangshan Port in east China's Shanghai.Photo:Xinhua

The Port of Shanghai, the world's largest, has been operating as usual and the port has not seen a backlog of container ships since February, the Shanghai International Port Group (SIPG) said on Saturday, in response to recent media reports claiming the port is suffering from serious delays and worsening congestion due to the city's pandemic flare-up.

All production units at the port are operating 24 hours a day unless affected by extreme weather, SIPG said in a post on its Wechat account on Saturday. 

It stressed that it has implemented the close-loop management at the port and enforced anti-pandemic measures in a "swift and strict manner" to guarantee the port's safety till the containment of the latest coronavirus outbreak, and to maintainthe stability of industrial chains in both the Yangtze River Delta region and globally.

Since March 28, the average waiting hour for container ships to be docked at Shanghai Port is less than 24 hours, and the number of ships waiting to load or discharge at the port is less than 10 vessels, which shows the docking efficiency has significantly improved from that of 2021, SIPG said. 

According to a report by thepaper.cn on Sunday, the average waiting hour for container ships in Asian ports, based on data from leading logistics companies like Maersk, is one to two days when faced with acoronavirus flare-up, which means the average waiting hour in Shanghai Port is shorter than some ports located in southern and northern coasts of China. 

SIPG said that the logistics efficiency at the Shanghai Port does being affected to a certain extent in recent days as truck drivers need to show negative nucleic acid testing results to carry out cross-province transportation. But the group has optimized a set of collecting and optimizing mechanism to alleviate the situation. 

For example, it has helped the shipping containers ship back empty containers in non-peak time in advance, while encouraged clients to deliver containers via shipping and railway, rather than land transportation which is more vulnerable to the pandemic. 

Shanghai Port is the world's largest container port, with container throughout reaching 47.03 million twenty-foot equivalent unit (TEUs) last year. It also handles 17 percent of China's total port volume, serving as a barometer of China's foreign trade and logistics chain. 

Some foreign media recently claimed, falsely, that the number of ships waiting to load or discharge cargo at the Port of Shanghai had "skyrocketed to more than 300 this week, a near fivefold increase in the past two and half weeks."

Global Times