A Shandong government delegation recently visited Europe, and a Shandong Port Group (SPG) delegation was with the delegation. During their stay, the SPG team visited customers, held conferences, signed agreements, and sought collaboration, resulting in new cooperation outcomes.

During its Europe visit, the SPG delegation engaged in in-depth and extensive interactions and reached several consensus with governments, diplomatic and consular missions, ports, shipping liners, and chambers of commerce from Greece, Norway, the UK, France, and Italy.

During the visit to the UK, SPG unveiled its UK representative office, a key platform envisioned to support China-UK industry and trade development. The launch of this office was met with high recognition and enthusiasm from attendees. COSCO Shipping UK expressed a strong willingness to expedite collaboration with the representative office, aiming to leverage mutual strengths to jointly develop the supply chain products of enterprises in both countries.

Additionally, SPG Overseas Development Group inked a memorandum of understanding on whole-process logistics cooperation with Lconnect, the leading independent logistics provider in the UK, which will significantly bolster SPG's efforts to enhance supply chain-related business in the UK.

In Greece, Qingdao Port signed a sister port relationship agreement with the Port of Piraeus, bringing the total number of SPG's sister ports to 47. The Piraeus Port Authority had high expectations of collaboration with Qingdao Port, deeming such an opportunity as a strong alliance between two hubs and a milestone in SPG's partnership with China COSCO Shipping, the controlling shareholder of the Port of Piraeus.

Moreover, during the delegation's visit, SPG established a series of promising cooperation intentions with relevant parties, including 13 with COSCO Shipping Group, Wallenius Wilhelmsen of Norway, BP from the UK, Trafigura from Singapore, the UK's Port of Liverpool and France's CMA CGM. These intentions encompass supply chain business, the building of an integrated new energy supply chain service system, and collaboration in shipping services. These productive outcomes will facilitate SPG's steady expansion of the global network layout and hasten its internationalization efforts.

In the future, SPG plans to make good use of the European visit to foster deeper and more extensive collaboration with partners of five European countries as part of efforts to make new contributions to serving and bolstering the China-Europe trade and economic exchange.

SPG and Lconnect sign a memorandum of understanding on whole-process logistics cooperation. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

Qingdao Port signs a sister port relationship agreement with the Port of Piraeus. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]