Roll-on/roll-off vessel Morning Post carrying 376 items of engineering machinery on Sept 24 departed Yantai Port, operated by Shandong Port Group, or SPG – the ports giant based in Qingdao city in East China's Shandong province – on special voyage.

The ship was headed to Belgium, where the products will be transferred to other European cities and distributed there – marking the official launch of SPG's first ro-ro service to Europe.

Functioning as the "north gate" of SPG, Yantai Port has tapped into a new operations segment brought about by its parent company's integration reforms. It has fully leveraged its role as a hub, improved its service capacity and stepped up its efforts to offer a first-class platform for clients to expand markets and introduce new forms of business.

By so doing, the port has attracted South Korean clients who now export commercial vehicles via its international transshipment ro-ro service, introducing the first ro-ro service between Shandong and Europe.

According to figures for the first eight months of this year, Yantai Port exported a total of 110,000 commercial vehicles and items of engineering machinery, up 311.6 percent year-on-year, ranking it third among China's ports that are exporting commercial vehicles.

The first shipment of the new ro-ro service between Yantai and Europe was reportedly 40,000 cubic meters of exported engineering machinery belonging to international equipment maker Caterpillar Inc. This was also Yantai Port's biggest export of Caterpillar machinery to date using a single vessel.

Thanks to the advantages demonstrated by the successful shipments of Caterpillar machinery and the regular operations of a foreign trade service, the port has attracted a number of international and domestic brands – including Doosan, Caterpillar and Shaanxi Automobile – to export products via its ro-ro service.

Moving forwards, Yantai Port is expected to rely on the new platform presented by SPG's new phase of integrated development and to seize important opportunities presented by the launch of the European ro-ro service.

The overall aim is understood to be to comprehensively expand the port's ro-ro service network, so that it reaches out to the world and promote the integration of the port services chain and commercial vehicle industrial supply chain.

As such, more efforts will be made to bolster the high-quality development of Shandong's economic growth and SPG's construction as a world-class seaport.