South Korea’s largest and busiest seaport is the Port of Busan, on the Korea Strait at the southeastern tip of the Korean Peninsula, facing Japan’s Tsushima Island. In 2024 it handled a record 24.4 million TEU (twenty-foot equivalent units) of containers, which placed it seventh in the world in Lloyd’s List’s ranking and first outside China and Singapore. It opened to international trade in 1876 under the Treaty of Ganghwa, and since 2004 it has been run by the Busan Port Authority. It matters because it carries the bulk of Korea’s foreign trade, more than three-quarters of the country’s container shipping in 2022, and because at least one of its newer terminals has set out to be a trans-Pacific transshipment hub. The port has two main halves: the old North Port in the city centre and the much larger Busan New Port to the west.
24.4 million TEU in 2024: how Busan’s record was built
Busan’s growth has been steady rather than dramatic. In 2010 the port handled about 14.2 million TEU, according to the Busan Port Authority. It passed 17 million in 2012, 19 million in 2015 and 20 million for the first time in 2017, when it moved about 20.5 million TEU. Traffic crossed 22 million in 2021 and reached its record 24.4 million in 2024.
The flat years: 2009, 2016 and 2020
Three pauses stand out. In 2009, during the global financial crisis, throughput fell from about 13.4 million TEU in 2008 to about 12.0 million. In 2016 it barely moved, at 19.46 million against 19.47 million the year before. That was the year Hanjin Shipping, then South Korea’s largest container line and one of the world’s ten biggest carriers, filed for receivership on 31 August; Hanjin had opened its first container yard at Busan in September 1970, and its ships were turned away or stranded in ports around the world while creditors seized assets. The company had filed at the Seoul Central District Court, and South Korean courts declared it bankrupt on 17 February 2017. The third pause came in 2020, the first pandemic year, when volume held at about 21.8 million TEU, fractionally below 2019’s 22.0 million. Each time, growth resumed within a year.
Where 24.4 million puts Busan in the world
In Lloyd’s List’s table of 2024 figures, the six ports ahead of Busan were Shanghai (51.5 million TEU), Singapore (41.1 million), Ningbo-Zhoushan (39.3 million), Shenzhen (33.4 million), Qingdao (30.9 million) and Guangzhou (about 26 million). Tianjin followed Busan in eighth place with 23.3 million. The picture has shifted a long way since 2003, when Busan was the fourth-largest container port in the world; it has more than doubled its volume since 2004, when it handled 11.4 million TEU, but the Chinese ports have grown far faster. Only about 55 to 60% of a TEU total are physical boxes, because most containers are 40-foot units counted as two TEU, so Busan’s 2024 record works out to something like 13 to 15 million containers lifted on or off ships.
Three-quarters of South Korea’s containers, and the reasons
The single most striking figure about Busan is its share of the national total: more than three-quarters of South Korea’s container traffic in 2022. Incheon, the port serving the capital region around Seoul, 314 km to the northwest, handles only a small fraction of Busan’s container volume, around 7% by one comparison. Part of the reason is position. Busan sits on the Korea Strait with easy access to the shipping lanes linking Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore, and it has been Korea’s main sea gate to Japan for six centuries. Since 2004 the Busan Port Authority has run the whole port as one system, and the city has gathered the business around it: the Korea Exchange, Korea Maritime Guarantee Insurance and the Maritime Finance Center are all based in Busan.
The other reason is what Korea sells. South Korea accounted for about 0.7% of world trade in 1970 and about 2.5% by 2003. In 2016 it exported goods worth about US$515 billion, led by integrated circuits, cars, refined petroleum, ships and vehicle parts, with China, the United States, Vietnam, Hong Kong and Japan as its main markets. Much of that output comes from the Southeastern Maritime Industrial Region, the belt of industrial cities centred on Busan and Ulsan that ranks among South Korea’s chief industrial centres, second only to the Seoul capital region, and much of it leaves in containers through Busan.
The port is not only a container hub. The 2007 cargo list included fertilisers, meat, scrap metal, crude oil and gas, coal, iron ore, timber, sand, grain and sugar. The South Port is home to the Busan Cooperative Fish Market, the country’s largest fishing base, which handles about 30% of Korea’s total volume of marine products, while Dadaepo Port to the west mainly lands coastal catches.
43 container berths split between North Port and Busan New Port
By 2020 Busan’s container terminals had 43 berths: 20 at the North Port and 23 at Busan New Port, two of the latter multi-purpose. The North Port is the historic harbour, sheltered between the city centre and Yeongdo Island. Beyond the container quays it holds the International Passenger Terminal, from which ferries sail to Izuhara and Hitakatsu on Tsushima and to Shimonoseki, Fukuoka and Osaka on the Japanese mainland. The Busan Harbor Bridge, completed in April 2014, spans the harbour between Yeongdo and Nam districts, and the city’s port system also counts the South Port, Gamcheon Port and Dadaepo Port.
Busan New Port lies west of the Nakdong River delta, known internationally for its high level of automation. The Nakdong, which takes its name from its role as the eastern border of the ancient Gaya confederacy, at about 506 km South Korea’s longest river, drains 23,384 km² and reaches the sea through a wide delta on Busan’s western edge. Beyond it, the New Port’s terminals lie near Gadeokdo, the largest island in Busan. One of them, Pusan Newport International Terminal, a joint venture of Singapore’s PSA International and Hanjin, opened in March 2010 with three deep-water berths, 1.2 km of quay and capacity for 2 million TEU a year.
Two pieces of infrastructure tie the New Port area to the region. The Busan–Geoje Fixed Link, opened on 13 December 2010, runs 8.2 km from Gadeokdo to Geoje Island, home of Korea’s big shipyards, cutting a road journey of about 210 minutes to about 40. Part of it is an immersed tunnel that lies 48 m below sea level, the deepest of its kind in the world when it opened. In April 2022 plans were announced for Gadeok Island Airport, partly on land and partly offshore, which would put an international airport beside the container terminals.
1876, 1950, 1970: the dates behind Busan’s numbers
Busan had traded with Japan for centuries before it became a modern port. In 1423 a port and a waegwan, a walled Japanese trading settlement, were established there, and for centuries Korea’s trade with Japan ran through the waegwan at Busan, which moved to Choryang, near today’s Yongdusan Park, in 1678. The Treaty of Ganghwa, concluded with Japan on 26 February 1876, made Busan the first Korean port open to international trade. A Japanese concession followed in 1877, with consulates from Japan, Qing China and Britain, and a customs office opened in 1883. The Gyeongbu railway line reached Busan in 1908, and in 1909 a ferry began sailing to Shimonoseki.
The Korean War made the port indispensable. Busan and Daegu were the only two South Korean cities the North Korean army did not capture in the first three months of the war. From 4 August to 18 September 1950, about 140,000 United Nations troops held the Pusan Perimeter, a 230 km defensive line around the southeastern tip of the peninsula, supplied through Busan’s wharves. Refugees poured in: around 500,000 were in the city in early 1951, and its population rose from 280,000 in 1945 to 840,000 in 1951. For a time Busan served as South Korea’s de facto capital.
Industry did the rest. In the 1970s, footwear and veneer factories drew workers until the city grew from 1.8 million to 3 million people, and Korean shipping lines entered the container trade, Hanjin opening its Busan yard in 1970. The port’s international ties date from the same period: sister-port agreements with Southampton in 1978, Seattle in 1981, Osaka and Rotterdam in 1985, New York and New Jersey in 1988 and Shanghai in 1994. Busan today has about 3.3 million people (2024), fewer than the 3.5 million of 2015, yet its port has kept setting records. The combination of that population and its cargo volume puts Busan among the “large-port metropolises” of the Southampton system of port-city classification, the same category as Hong Kong.
For the landscape that funnels Korea’s trade to this corner of the peninsula, see our guide to the geography of the Korean Peninsula; the goods behind the figures are covered in our look at the economy of South Korea, and Busan’s 1994 sister port is profiled in our article on the Port of Shanghai.