Top 10 Busiest Ports in the World, Counted Down from Rotterdam to Shanghai

The world’s busiest port is Shanghai, which handled about 47.3 million TEU (twenty-foot equivalent units) of containers in 2022, followed by Singapore with 37.3 million and Ningbo-Zhoushan with 33.4 million, according to Lloyd’s List’s One Hundred Container Ports ranking. The rest of the top 10 for that year were Shenzhen, Qingdao, Guangzhou, Busan, Tianjin, Hong Kong and Rotterdam. Seven of the ten are in mainland China or Hong Kong, only one is outside Asia, and together they moved roughly 273 million TEU. Shanghai has held first place every year since 2010, and on 22 December 2024 it became the first port to pass 50 million TEU in a single year.

A note on the yardstick before the countdown. Ports are ranked here by container throughput, measured in TEU: a 20-foot box counts as one, a 40-foot box as two. Because 40-foot boxes dominate, the number of physical containers is only about 55–60% of the TEU figure. Ranking by total cargo tonnage, which includes oil, coal and iron ore, gives a different order, and on that measure Ningbo-Zhoushan overtook Shanghai in 2012 to become the world’s largest port. The countdown uses Lloyd’s List’s 2022 figures, the last year in which all ten of these ports appear in its top 10. In the 2024 ranking the first eight are unchanged, with Shanghai at 51.5 million TEU, but Jebel Ali in Dubai (15.5 million) and Port Klang in Malaysia (14.6 million) take ninth and tenth, pushing Rotterdam to 11th and Hong Kong to 12th. Later figures are given port by port below.

Lloyd’s List’s 2022 top 10 in one table

No. 10 and No. 9: Rotterdam and Hong Kong, the two that are slipping

10. Rotterdam, Netherlands — 14.5 million TEU. The only non-Asian port in the top 10 is the largest seaport in Europe. It covers 105 km² and stretches about 40 km from the historic harbours of the city centre, through Botlek and Europoort, to the reclaimed Maasvlakte land that juts into the North Sea. Its advantage is the Rhine–Meuse delta: barges and the Betuweroute freight railway carry boxes inland to Germany and beyond, to a hinterland of more than 500 million consumers. Rotterdam was the world’s busiest port by cargo tonnage from 1962 until Singapore overtook it in 2004. Container volumes peaked at 15.3 million TEU in 2021; Wikipedia’s table gives 13.4 million for 2023, which pushed it down to 12th behind Port Klang in Malaysia.

9. Hong Kong — 16.7 million TEU. No port on this list has fallen further. Hong Kong was the busiest container port on Earth in 1987–89, 1992–97 and 1999–2004, and in the Lloyd’s List series it handled more than 24 million TEU in 2008 and again in 2011. Its nine container terminals at Kwai Chung, Stonecutters Island and Tsing Yi share 24 berths along about 8,500 metres of quay, with a combined capacity of over 18 million TEU. Much of the explanation sits across the border: Shenzhen and Guangzhou, on the same Pearl River Delta, grew from 13.6 million and 3.3 million TEU in 2004 to 30.0 million and 24.9 million in 2022. By 2023 Hong Kong’s throughput was down to about 14.3 million TEU.

Nos. 8 to 6: Tianjin, Busan and Guangzhou in the 21–25 million TEU band

8. Tianjin, China — 21.0 million TEU. Tianjin is the largest port in northern China and the sea gateway to Beijing, which lies about 170 km to the north-west. It sits on Bohai Bay at the mouth of the Haihe River, and its core Xingang (“New Port”) area, begun under Japanese occupation in 1940, reopened to traffic on 17 October 1952 with a channel only 6 metres deep. It is the largest artificial port in mainland China, covering 121 km² of land. Growth has been steep: from 3.8 million TEU in 2004 to more than 21 million in 2022. The port is also remembered for the explosions at a chemical warehouse in Binhai on 12 August 2015, which killed 173 people.

7. Busan, South Korea — 22.1 million TEU. Opened in 1876 at the mouth of the Nakdong River, facing Japan’s Tsushima Island across the Korea Strait, Busan handled more than three-quarters of South Korea’s container shipping in 2022. Its rank is partly national, since about 83% of South Korea’s exports travel in containers and the port at Incheon handles only around 7% of the country’s boxes, and partly geographic: Busan is within easy reach of Japan, China and the main lanes south to Hong Kong and Singapore. The port has two main parts, the older North Port and the highly automated Busan New Port, both run by the Busan Port Authority (founded 2004), and throughput reached a record 24.4 million TEU in 2024.

6. Guangzhou, China — 24.9 million TEU. Guangzhou has been a trading port since the Qin dynasty, and today it is the largest comprehensive port in South China, with its deep-water Nansha harbour area near the mouth of the Pearl River. The port lies where the Dongjiang, Xijiang and Beijiang rivers meet, which makes it a transport hub for inland provinces such as Guangxi, Guizhou and Hunan. In 2004 it handled 3.3 million TEU; by 2022 it handled nearly 25 million.

Nos. 5 and 4: Qingdao on the Yellow Sea and Shenzhen beside Hong Kong

5. Qingdao, China — 25.7 million TEU. Shandong province’s main port faces the Yellow Sea and is split into four areas: the old Dagang harbour, the Qianwan container area, the Huangdao oil port and Dongjiakou, about 40 km south of the city. Besides its container terminals, Qingdao has a large terminal for imported iron ore. Since 2020 it has been building a suspended monorail able to carry fully loaded 20- and 40-foot containers, the first of its kind, with a first phase in use from 2021.

4. Shenzhen, China — 30.0 million TEU. Shenzhen is not one port but six port areas spread along 260 km of coastline and split in two by Hong Kong’s New Territories. Yantian and Dapeng in the east face Mirs Bay, while the western ports, including Nanshan (home of Shekou) and Dachan Bay, sit on the Pearl River estuary. Together they have about 140 berths. Its throughput has more than doubled since 2004, when it handled 13.6 million TEU. In 2022 it moved 30,036,000 TEU, although it has slipped behind Ningbo-Zhoushan to third place within China.

Nos. 3 and 2: Ningbo-Zhoushan and Singapore

3. Ningbo-Zhoushan, China — 33.4 million TEU. Across Hangzhou Bay from Shanghai, Ningbo was established as a port in 738 and, as Mingzhou, was one of the three great foreign-trade harbours of the Tang dynasty. It became one of the five treaty ports opened by the Treaty of Nanking in 1842. Ningbo merged with neighbouring Zhoushan in 2006, and the combined port is a deep-water harbour with a 250,000-tonne crude oil terminal and ore berths for ships of over 200,000 tonnes. Those bulk berths are why it overtook Shanghai in 2012 to become the world’s largest port by total tonnage, handling 888.96 million tonnes in 2015. Its container growth has been the fastest at the top: from about 4.0 million TEU in 2004 to 33.4 million in 2022 and, by the port’s own figure, 39.3 million in 2024.

2. Singapore — 37.3 million TEU. Singapore is the world’s largest transshipment hub: around 90% of its containers in 2024 were simply moved from one ship to another rather than entering or leaving Singapore by land. It sits at the southern end of the Strait of Malacca, the main sea route between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific, and is reckoned to transship about a fifth of the world’s shipping containers. Stamford Raffles founded the British port in 1819 for the deep, sheltered water of Keppel Harbour. Today PSA International is moving all container work west to the automated Tuas mega port, officially opened on 1 September 2022; the city terminals are due to close in 2027 and Pasir Panjang in 2040. Singapore was the busiest container port from 2005 until Shanghai overtook it in 2010, and its throughput reached 41.12 million TEU in 2024 and a record 44.66 million in 2025.

No. 1: Shanghai, Yangshan and the 50-million-TEU year

1. Shanghai, China — 47.3 million TEU. Shanghai’s rise is a story of escaping shallow water. The old port on the Huangpu River and the Yangtze estuary was too shallow for large container ships, which often had to wait for high tide. The answer was Yangshan Deep-Water Port, built by reclaiming land between islands in Hangzhou Bay and linking them to Pudong by the 32.5 km Donghai Bridge, completed in December 2005. Yangshan’s berths are up to 15 metres deep. Its first phase opened in 2004, the second in December 2006 and the third by 2010, and the highly automated fourth phase began trial operations on 10 December 2017.

The other half of the explanation is the hinterland. The port is the main foreign-trade gateway for the Yangtze River region, a densely populated industrial belt that takes in Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Anhui and Henan provinces, and the Yangtze itself carries river traffic deep into the interior. In 2010 Shanghai overtook Singapore with 29.05 million TEU, about half a million ahead, and it has stayed first every year since. It handled 43.3 million in 2019, 47.3 million in 2022, about 49 million in 2023, and crossed 50 million on 22 December 2024. Phase by phase, the volume has more than tripled in twenty years.

Read as a whole, the top 10 is a map of where goods are made. Seven of the ports serve China’s coastal manufacturing regions (the Yangtze Delta, the Pearl River Delta and the northern coast on the Bohai and Yellow Sea), Singapore earns its rank mainly by relaying other countries’ cargo, Busan is the gateway for South Korea’s exports, and Rotterdam is the single European port in the group. All of them depend on narrow sea lanes; the ones that matter most are mapped in our guide to the world’s shipping chokepoints, and Singapore’s own lifeline is explained in what the Strait of Malacca is and why it matters. For ports ranked by tonnes of cargo rather than boxes, where oil, coal and ore harbours enter the picture, see our look at the world’s biggest cargo ports.