China-Europe Freight Trains Facilitated Belt and Road International Trade Channels
On November 14, after completing the customs clearance procedures at Jiaozhou Customs under the jurisdiction of Qingdao Customs, a Central European freight train loaded full of goods such as machinery parts, household appliances, textile and clothing slowly departed from SCODA Qingdao Multimodal Transport Center. The train will exit the border at the Horgos port, head west all the way through Altynkol, Alma-Ata, Sergeli, and eventually reach Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan.
This freight train has 50 cars in total, carrying 100 TEUs of cargo weighing 1,200 tons. "Our goods can reach their destination in about six days, which saves two-thirds of the time compared to shipping through the Suez Canal to European ports and then through transshipment to Central Asia." said Wang Jing, Manager of the Business Department of Shandong Jiaoyuntong Supply Chain Management Co., Ltd.
According to statistics of Jiaozhou Customs, in the first ten months of this year, a total of 455 China-Europe freight trains were handled by Qingdao Multimodal Transport Center of SCODA, up by 42.6% year-on-year, and 37,000 TEUs of containers were handled by international freight trains, up by 72.2% year-on-year.
SCODA is committed to building a new platform for Belt and Road international cooperation, and building a pattern for opening up through links running eastward and westward, across land and over the sea. With the China-Europe freight train as an important transport channel for foreign trade goods, Shandong has accelerated its integration into the construction of the Belt and Road. Thanks to the advantages of Shandong's manufacturing industry, its export products have a large market in countries and regions along the Belt and Road, and its import of production materials from those countries and regions has increased substantially. According to the statistics of Qingdao Customs, in the first ten months of this year, the import and export of Shandong to countries and regions along the Belt and Road reached 748.37 billion yuan, up by 42.0%, accounting for 31.4% of the total import and export value of Shandong province, up by 1.3 percentage points. Among them, Qingdao's import and export to countries and regions along the Belt and Road reached 210.33 billion yuan, up by 48.0%.