Liangjiang New Area recently announced that Guoyuan Port Logistics and Warehousing Center will be put into use by the end of this year.

The project attracted an investment of two billion yuan ($ 32.65 million) and its construction area is 400,000 sq meters. Upon completion, it will reduce freight links and logistics costs. On December 5, 2013, with a planned investment of 10.5 billion yuan, China's largest inland port – Guoyuan Port – officially opened.

According to the Yangtze River economic belt plan, Guoyuan Port will launch a railway line connecting with the Chongqing-Xinjiang-Europe International Railway in 2015, which will realize railway-water-road through-transport. Guoyuan Port is an important platform for Chongqing and for building Liangjiang New Area into an inland international logistics hub. Guoyuan Port is close to industrial parks in Liangjiang New Area such as Yufu Industrial Park, which have large logistical demands.

In addition, shipping freight using water transport is much cheaper, typically 1/20 that of road transport and 1/10 that of railway transport. Guoyuan Port will therefore play an important role in connecting the Yangtze River economic belt and Silk Road economic zone, speeding up the inland opening-up and expanding the international logistics platform which connects Eurasia.

Six billion yuan of the 10.5 billion yuan investment has already been allocated. According to the "port in the front and garden in the back" layout, it’s planned to construct 16 5,000-ton berths with an annual throughput capacity of 30 million tons, including two million tons of TEU (Twenty-Equivalent Unit) containers, six million tons bulk cargo, and one million tons of commodities and automobiles.

Guoyuan Port's ambitions do not stop there. It aims to become the largest container distribution center, bulk cargo distribution center, commodity and automobile distribution center, bulk means of production trading center and comprehensive services center in the upper reaches of the Yangtze River. Earlier, the State Council released its Yangtze River economic belt plan，in a bid to develop it into an inland river economic belt with a global economic influence.

According to the plan, Chongqing has been named as one of the three major shipping centers in China, which will bring new opportunities for European and American investors to expand China's inland markets. In April of this year, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang inspected the four-square-kilometer Guoyuan Port in Liangjiang New Area and praised it as a "first port". He expected that Guoyuan Port could create a kind of "big traffic" pattern, and link the huge markets of the Yangtze River economic belt and the Silk Road economic zone.

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By Huang Pei

Edited by Brian Salter