World’s largest inland port to optimize trade through Silk Road route
Visits to the Port of Duisburg by senior government officials from China have showcased the German trading hub’s importance to the global Silk Road route under the framework of Belt and Road Initiative.
As the world’s largest inland port, Duisburg has provided the start and end point for freight trains that travel regularly between destinations in China and Europe.
Duisport Group helps to facilitate this important role in the trade with China as it is the pre-eminent Central European hub for transcontinental land connections.
Every week, 400 train connections link the Port of Duisburg with more than 80 destinations in Europe and Asia. Two thousand shallow-draft maritime vessels and more than 20,000 inland water vessels also ensure a smooth flow of goods on the water, with more than 100 destinations across Europe.
Currently, 30 trains travel weekly on various routes between locations in China and Duisburg.
In the 2017 financial year, more than 100,000 twentyfoot equivalent units were transported between the two. The trains from China bring electronic products and merchandise to Europe, and return with consumer goods as well as spare parts and machinery components.
The plans of Chinese initiators and the stakeholders in the Silk Road route are envisioning a steady increase in traffic for these trains.
Chinese investors, such as the China Merchants Group, are pushing the project ahead with single-minded purpose, supported by their respective regional and local partners along the northern and southern Silk Road routes.
As the number of train crossings increase, more action will be needed at the strategic hubs at the border of Belarus and Poland. For example, while freight trains currently take six to seven days to complete the 10,000-kilometer-long journey between Chongqing in Southwest China and Brest in Belarus, they require a further sixto-seven days for the remaining 1,300-kilometer distance between Poland and Duisburg.
Therefore, it is important that the efficiency of the routes is optimized so that larger volumes of goods can be moved faster and more reliably, and with increased precision. It also requires the simplification of unloading at the relevant border crossings due to the different track gauges, and the optimum coordination of train timetables.
Intensive discussions are under way with regard to the high number of time-consuming engineer changeovers on the routes west of Belarus through Poland and Germany. The optimization and harmonization of customs procedures between the participating neighboring countries is also a topic of discussion.
The objective is to reduce the journey time to 10 days in the future using a variety of measures. In this way, the trains from China would continue to increase in importance, particularly as an alternative to expensive air cargo.
Key Minsk hub
With a view to optimizing structures in the globalized logistics sector, Duisport Group feels a responsibility to contribute its own competence in the interests of customers and partners in the German economy in strategically relevant projects and target regions.
This is achieved not least through its current participation in the operating company for the world’s largest project involving an international industrial and logistics park — Great Stone. The park is being constructed in cooperation with partners from China and Belarus at the edge of the northern Silk Road near Minsk, the capital of Belarus.
The over 90-square kilometer park is six times the size of the Port of Duisburg, and it is designed to become a home for international industrial, trading and logistics companies as well as a large hub on the Silk Road with the existing east-west traffic connections in Europe.
The Belarusian government has asked Duisport to develop a “Logistics Master Plan”. It will offer the main options for optimizing transportation, loading and storage conditions at this central hub and for Belarus as a whole — an important step in the interest of the companies that want to and must transport goods between the continents.
Duisport was entrusted with this important task because it will be able to incorporate its experience from the positioning of the western German city as a leading Central European logistics hub, as well as its experience with the development of future concepts for international ports, such as Santos in Brazil and Jebel Ali in Dubai. Duisport, together with strategic partners such as the China Merchants Group, will intensively drive forward construction and success of the Silk Road projects.