The first thing that comes out from people’s mind when they hear about Ningbo is ‘Seaport’. Since more than thousand years ago, Ningbo has been known as one of China’s major ports for foreign trade, and today I’m excited to share with you about my colleague’s visit to Ningbo Port. Before I get started, let me be clear to you. Ningbo Port is not only used to mention the port of Ningbo, but also is a name of the company who manage the port: Ningbo Port Group Co., Ltd.

So, last week my colleague visited the Beilun Port (which is 1 of the 6 ports that are belonged to Ningbo Port Group Co., Ltd.) with some Mexican students and a freight forwarder company, Ningbo Ever-lasing Logistics. The port of Ningbo is a modern multi-purpose deep water port. In 2006, the Port of Ningbo merged with the Port of Zhoushan. Now, it is the largest port in China mainland and the busiest port in the world in terms of cargo tonnage.

Let’s get started!

This is the front gate of the company

As soon as the team arrived at Beilun Port, the company representatives took them to the meeting room and showed them video about the history and condition of Ningbo Port.

After that, led by one of the company’s managers, they started the journey to take a closer look of the port by bus to avoid any dangers as it was a busy working time and it was raining.

The picturesque of the whole terminal:

This is what we call the ” Gate in ” in the operation. Sometimes the O/F (ocean freight) is determined at this time (Cargo send in – valid freight; Cargo no send in – GRI ).

Headed into the terminal. The big blue structure on the left is the gantry crane, which is used to move containers by lifting them up.

The orange structures are bridge crane, which is used to move the containers into or off the ship.

Finally the bus stopped beside the Maersk ship. The manager told them that this was a 10,000 TEU ship which went to western America, and right there you can see how the bridge crane works to load and unload containers.

On their way out of the terminal, they came across stacks of containers on yard, waiting to be loaded on board.

Now, let’s move on to the next site that will also answer your curiosity about the real time containers loading!

Container Yard and Warehouse

The next place that they visited is Ningbo Skylark Container Co., Ltd. , a company which manages containers and cargos storage (container yard and warehouse). A container yard is a place where exporters’ trucks come to get an empty container and bring it to their place for container loading.

Whereas, a warehouse is a place to store the cargos and do the LCL container loading.