News
The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism (MLIT) of Japan unveiled on July 15 that international container ports in the nation processed a total of 21.16 million TEUs of containers in 2015 (January-December), which decreased 3% from the previous year. It was the first time since 2009 that container throughput had diminished from a year earlier.
The ministry’s Port and Harbor Bureau pointed out a major reason behind the decline in overall container lifting, saying that containers to and from China, which account for approximately 40% of the overall volume of those moved to and from Japan, suffered the first year-on-year fall in six years.
The MLIT aggregates preliminary data sent from regional port and harbor administrators. The total exceeded the 20-million-TEU line since 2013, although it went down from the all-time high of 21.81 million TEUs reached in 2014.
Looking at the 2015 total in detail, oceangoing containers accounted for 17.28 million TEUs, which went down 3.8% from a year earlier, consisting of 8.635 million TEUs of exports, down 3.7%, and 8.65 million TEUs of imports, down 3.6%.
By port, the top five were Tokyo, Yokohama, Kobe, Nagoya and Osaka, which handled 4.63 million TEUs, 2.787 million TEUs, 2.707 million TEUs, 2.63 million TEUs and 2.222 million TEUs, respectively.