When the 2026 North Bund Forum was held in Shanghai recently, around 4,000 participants gathered at the North Bund to build deeper consensus on global shipping win-win cooperation.
As a flagship event for the shipping sector, the forum featured over 60 sessions. Together with related events, more than 15,000 people including foreign peers from over 50 countries and regions gathered in the eastern China metropolis.
Arsenio Dominguez, Secretary-General of the International Maritime Organization (IMO), called for resilience and cooperation in the global shipping industry against the backdrop of technological transformation, energy transition and challenges stemming from complex geopolitical situations.
In the face of multiple risks and challenges currently, the global shipping sector should deepen practical cooperation, actively respond to difficulties and jointly safeguard safe and unimpeded international shipping, noted Liu Wei, Minister of Transport.
As one of the international shipping centers, Shanghai boasts increasingly explicit advantages arising from its coordinated construction of the international economic, financial, trade, shipping and sci-tech innovation centers.
"Shanghai will continue to pursue high-quality development and efficiency gains and cooperate with related parties to build the world-class port and airport clusters in the Yangtze River Delta," said Zhu Zhongming, mayor of Shanghai.
The resilience of the global shipping industry always rests upon stability of every node and coordination among all partners, said Wan Min, chairman of China COSCO Shipping Corp., Ltd., expecting that related parties could contribute jointly to building an efficient, safe, green and smart modern global shipping industrial system.
During the forum, development goals and a roadmap for the Shanghai Port-Port of Hamburg green shipping corridor and outlines for the implementation plan of the Shanghai Port-Port of Melbourne green shipping corridor were unveiled to speed up green shipping transformation.
Shipping finance and insurance, the "lifeblood" and the "armor" of the shipping economy, are playing an increasingly prominent role as the "ballast" and "stabilizer", held Xu Lirong, chairman of China Shipowners Mutual Assurance Association.
At a sub-forum, Shanghai Shipping Exchange Institute, which is still under construction, released new route indices under the Shanghai Containerized Freight Index, covering seven routes from Shanghai to Europe to update upstream and downstream enterprises on more precise and segmented freight references and settlement benchmarks.
Home to venues of the forum, Shanghai's Hongkou District has attracted over 4,600 shipping service enterprises, among which there are plenty of leading enterprises across the industrial chain. (Edited by Duan Jing with Xinhua Silk Road, duanjing@xinhua.org)
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