Beibu Gulf Port Group reported on 17 October 2026 that the Pinglu Canal, the first canal built since the founding of the People's Republic of China to link inland rivers directly to the sea, opened to navigation on 16 September. By midnight on 16 October, after one full month, the group had handled more than 970,000 tonnes of canal cargo. At about 9:00 on 17 October, as the vessel Guigang Haitong 6688 sailed upstream out of the Madao hub, cumulative canal throughput passed 1 million tonnes.
To build cargo volume, the group sent six research teams to Guizhou, Yunnan, Sichuan and other parts of Southwest China and visited more than 200 customers, offering tailored river-sea transport plans. On the sea side, 13 berths have been adapted for canal vessels, adding about 32 million tonnes of river-sea handling capacity. Berths 7 to 10 South at the Beimu operating area of Beihai's Tieshan Port are complete and in operation, berths 4 and 5 at Qinzhou Port's Dalanping area have passed handover acceptance with the aim of starting operations within 2026, and berth 5 at Nanning's Hesun operating area is under construction for completion by the end of 2027. During the National Day holiday, Qinzhou terminal handled a record 67,800 tonnes of river-vessel cargo in a single day, and Honggang terminal reached 675 TEU in one day with an average port stay of only 5 hours.
On the river side, port areas under Beigang Xijiang Port handled more than 940,000 tonnes of canal-related cargo by 15 October. Nanning Port alone handled more than 668,000 tonnes in September, its highest monthly figure since the port was built, and its cargo mix is shifting from bulk materials and grain toward containers and water-to-water transshipment.
Beigang Logistics had shipped more than 300,000 tonnes by 16 October. It has set up a 70-mu yard in Baise with storage capacity of 116,700 tonnes, opened the Pinglu Canal's first foreign-trade container route to Vietnam, completed Guangxi's first export movable-property pledge financing under a multimodal single-document arrangement, and issued 4 eNCD transferable electronic documents. The group plans to explore through-container foreign-trade export solutions and one-ticket, one-stop logistics services covering river-sea, river-sea-rail and river-sea-road combinations.