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Qingdao delegation visits Piraeus port in Greece

( chinadaily.com.cn )

Updated: 2014-12-19

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The coastal city of Qingdao, Shandong province, sent a delegation headed by Zhang Xinqi, mayor of the city, on a visit to the Piraeus port in Athens, the largest one in Greece, which is jointly operated by China's State-owned shipping giant China Ocean Shipping Company (COSCO) and the Greek port authority under a 35-year lease signed in 2009.

Zhang expressed appreciation for the development strategy of COSCO and voiced hope of cooperating with the company to build a logistics base in Europe for Qingdao’s export trade.

Attending the activities were Ma Weigang, director of Qingdao's commerce bureau, Cui Weidong, head of Qingdao's foreign affairs office and Wang Yajun, director general of Qingdao urban planning bureau. With a total investment of 300 million euro ($374 million) from COSCO, the Piraeus Container Terminal project has become a model of Sino-Greek and Sino-European cooperation, vowing to jointly build Piraeus as a top port in the Mediterranean.

COSCO, one of the major multinational enterprises in the world, is China's largest and the world's leading group specializing in global shipping, modern logistics and ship building and repairing, ranking the 327th in Fortune Global 500. Established in 1961, COSCO owns over 800 modern merchant vessels with a total tonnage of 56 million DWTs and an annual carrying capacity of 400 million tons. It carried over three million twenty equivalent-unit (TEU) containers in 2014, with the retained profits topping over 20 million euro.