(Yicai Global) July 11 -- Shanghai, home to the world’s biggest and busiest sea port, has taken third place for the third year in a row in a ranking of international maritime centers published jointly by China’s Xinhua News Agency and the Baltic Exchange, a global maritime data provider.

Shanghai scored 82.79 points, according to this year’s Xinhua-Baltic International Shipping Centre Development Index Report, released today. Singapore and London ranked first and second with 94.88 and 83.04 points, respectively.

The eastern Chinese city also closed the gap on the other two, as the difference between first and third and second and third places shrank to 12.09 points and 0.25 point from 15.02 points and 0.38 point, respectively.

Hong Kong, Dubai, Rotterdam, Hamburg, New York/New Jersey, Athens/Piraeus, and Zhoushan, secured the fourth to 10th slots on the list.

Begun in 2014, the Xinhua-Baltic index evaluates locations based on three main indicators -- port infrastructure, shipping services, and general environment -- and 16 secondary indicators.

Shanghai’s port ranked first worldwide by container throughput this year for the 12th straight year, Xinhua noted. The city also continued to attract various firms in the shipping supply chain, including those in brokering, law, finance, insurance, information consulting, as well as education and training, further boosting its overall competitiveness in the shipping industry.

The Port of Shanghai ran normally, 24 hours a day throughout the Covid-19 outbreak that hit the city in March, and its capacity swiftly rose after the city’s two-month lockdown ended on June 1. The port’s daily average container throughput reached 126,000 twenty-foot equivalent units last month, recovering to more than 95 percent of that in the same period last year, according to transport ministry data. 

Editor: Futura Costaglione