This year's one millionth container is processed at Tonghai Port. [Photo/haimen.gov.cn]

Tonghai Port in Nantong, East China's Jiangsu province, reported that it achieved its overall container throughput goal for 2019 on Nov 22, 39 days before the end of the year. It has been setting records in monthly container throughput since the beginning of this year.

The port currently operates 10 direct routes to domestic cities such as Yingkou, Tianjin, Quanzhou, Dalian, and Xiamen, as well as to a number of cities in Japan and South Korea.

Its monthly container throughput exceeded 100,000 twenty-foot container equivalent units (TEUs) in June for the first time, and it later set a record in July with 119,000 TEUs. Total container throughput from January to October was 928,000 TEUs.

According to Tao Yu, a senior executive, the port will continue to introduce more routes to Southeast Asia and other regions around the world. It hopes to be able to handle more than two million containers annually by 2022.

Tonghai Port is the largest port in Haimen, a county-level city in Nantong. Construction on the port was divided into two stages, the first of which began in June 2016 and started trial operations on June 30, 2018.

The port has received 2.2 billion yuan ($310.42 million) in investment so far and has proved over the past few years to have a strong production capacity.