China remains Port of Hamburg's largest trading partner

China remained the most important trading partner of the Port of Hamburg, Germany's largest universal port, in 2022, registering only a slight decline in seaborne container throughput, Port of Hamburg Marketing (HHM) said on Monday.

With 2.46 million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs), China was the port's number one trading partner "by a wide margin," the company said in a statement.

"Part of the container transshipment with China handled through Hamburg is attributable to transshipment with Russia," an HHM spokesperson told Xinhua. These volumes were missing compared to the previous year. "We hope that the transshipment between China and Hamburg will continue to stabilize."

The most important product groups imported from China and handled at the port of Hamburg included machinery, chemicals and metals. Wood products, food and vehicles, on the other hand, were among the goods that were frequently shipped to China, according to HHM.

China has been Germany's most important trading partner for seven years in a row. In 2022, the total trade volume between the two countries grew 20.9 percent year-on-year to 297.9 billion euros (US$318.8 billion), according to the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis).

Germany's important automotive industry is no exception. Last year, the country's largest carmaker, Volkswagen, delivered close to 3.2 million vehicles to China, almost four times as many as to its second-largest single market, the United States.

"The Chinese economy is too big to decouple from it completely," Juergen Matthes, an expert at the German Economic Institute (IW), said earlier this month. "No one wants that, and it would not make sense."