It will boost exports, favored by the trade agreement between both countries.
Ecuador has inaugurated a new trade route with China, which will connect Guayaquil to Shanghai via the port of Chancay (Peru), in a journey that will take 27 days and aims to enhance exports under the trade agreement between the two countries, in effect since last year, Efe reported.
The route is handled by the Chinese shipping company Cosco Shipping, which operates the port of Chancay and expects that with the integration of Ecuador, it will mark “a significant step in the construction” of its “network of routes in Latin America,” detailed the company’s CEO, Tao Weidong, during the inauguration in a video.
Route
The port of Guayaquil, for the next three years, will be an additional point along the WSA5 route, which will travel to Chancay from the northern part of the continent, passing through the Colombian port of Buenaventura. According to Weidong, this integration will “strengthen connectivity throughout the region and provide a new boost to the economic development of the continent.”
Contecon CEO (the company managing the port of Guayaquil), Javier Lanza, pointed out that before this new route, goods heading to China from Ecuador by ship took between 35 up to 55 days to reach their destination, as they had to pass through other ports in the northern region.
China, which led the construction of the Chancay port, inaugurated at the end of 2024 about 78 kilometers north of Lima with an investment of around 1.4 billion dollars in its first phase, overtook the United States in 2022 as Ecuador’s main trading partner for non-oil products.
For this reason, Lanza considered that the opening of this new route with Cosco is “a great step” that Ecuador is taking to improve its competitiveness.
Products
“The product that would benefit the most from this reduction in transit time is the banana, which is Ecuador’s flagship product. Every day we reduce the transit time is a day we gain on the shelf, and that is obviously a huge impact,” said Lanza, although he pointed out that many other products, such as shrimp, will also benefit.
“Costs will evidently decrease, as every day is a saving for the entire logistics chain, and if it’s at least seven days less, imagine how much money that represents,” he told the media, without providing specific figures.
Lanza added that this route will operate once a week, and that precisely this Friday, a second ship left the port of Guayaquil for Chancay, after last week’s trial voyage.
Commerce
At the inauguration of this route, Richard Salazar, the CEO of the Banana Marketing and Export Association (Acorbanec), was present and pointed out that the reduction in travel time “will undoubtedly stimulate Ecuador’s foreign trade and banana exports in particular.”
“Our growth is heading toward East Asia, with China as the main destination, where we already have a trade agreement that has led to a two percentage point reduction in tariffs,” he emphasized.
The director of the association stated that, in 2024, from the 365 million boxes of bananas exported, 4% went to China, a figure they expect to triple or even quadruple in the coming years.
Meanwhile, the Chinese Consul General in Guayaquil, Gao Zhenting, highlighted that last year, the volume of trade between China and Ecuador reached 13.97 billion dollars, an increase of 2.3% year-on-year.
Source: El Peruano
