Taizhou ports handled more than 4.4 million metric tons of cargo in the first quarter of this year, rising by 53 percent year-on-year, local authorities said.

The growth can be attributed to intensified efforts by the city to get more companies from home and abroad to use its ports, as well as preferential policies encouraging enterprises to transport goods by sea instead of by roads.

Despite being a coastal city with excellent water transportation conditions, far more goods in Taizhou are transported by road than sea.

In 2019, local authorities rolled out a guideline to boost the city's sea transport capacity.   

From January to March, the container volume which shifted from being exported by road to sea in Taizhou soared by nearly 130 percent.

Over the same period, the city's accumulated bulk cargo throughput amounted to nearly 3.14 million tons, an uptick of 67 percent.

Optimized port operations and management have also played a part in the growth of cargo throughput. In the past three months, the berthing time for bulk cargo vessels in the city was reduced by nearly 20 percent compared with the same period last year.