Port authorities in Shenzhen are working aggressively to persuade foreign carriers to skip Hong Kong as a transit hub and do business directly with them, reported the South China Morning Post.
Shenzhen is well-placed to overtake Hong Kong as the world's third busiest container port this year. The city could replace Hong Kong as the region's primary transhipment hub for goods, port operators warned.
Last year about 60 percent of Hong Kong's container throughput came from transhipments. Half of it was due to regulation on the mainland that bans foreign shipping companies from directly sending cargo from one mainland port to another. This regulation is designed to protect the monopoly of domestic shipping lines on the near-sea trade.
However, a document seen by the Post showed that a Shenzhen Customs office has been advising an international shipping line how to use a paperwork loophole to skip Hong Kong and go directly to Shenzhen. It said the foreign shippers could simply name Hong Kong as the port of origin in the manifest they submit to Shenzhen Customs without actually loading any goods there.
The Post found that at least two Shenzhen ports and two major international carriers have diverted hundreds of thousands of boxes a month away from Kwai Chung Container Terminals.
One port operator in Shenzhen, requesting anonymity, said other ports and shipping lines feared they might lose out if they did not adopt the same practice.
Alan Lee Yiu-kwong, chairman of the Hong Kong Container Terminal Operators Association, said they had raised the issue with the Transport and Housing Bureau, urging an investigation.
"Transhipment is the last fort of Hong Kong's port business and if we lost that it will mark the end of our port," Lee said.
Hong Kong handled 18.3 million TEUs in the first 10 months this year-a drop of 5.4 percent from a year ago. That compared with 19.31 million TEUs handled by Shenzhen, a slight rise of 0.53 per cent.
Several mainland cities including Guangzhou were already lobbying Beijing to further open up the coastal sea trade following the setting up of a free trade zone in Shanghai eight weeks ago.
Authorities have relaxed the ban on foreign-flagged ships owned by mainland companies conducting domestic trade, and Shanghai's maritime and port regulators were fighting to extend the relaxation to cover foreign-owned vessels.
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