Yantai Municipal Government reported on 2 November 2026 that a batch of steel floated by water from Zhangjiagang Port to Shandong Port Yantai Port's Penglai area, then sailed to South America combined with ton-bag fertilizer already staged at the port. The move marks the formal opening of the Zhangjiagang Port-Yantai-South America river-sea multimodal corridor. Yantai Port is using its multimodal system to help manufacturers in the Yangtze River Economic Belt export.
Zhangjiagang sits on the south bank of the lower Yangtze. It was among the first Class-I open ports on the river and sits next to the Suzhou-Wuxi-Changzhou manufacturing cluster, with rich export cargo in the hinterland. Yantai Port operates 37 breakbulk international liner services covering Africa, South America, Europe and Southeast Asia. Southern Jiangsu steel, heavy equipment and similar cargo can move by Yangtze vessels to Yantai and then connect to ocean liners, addressing the ocean-exit constraint faced by inland river ports and building an inland river feeder port plus ocean hub port model.
In operations, Yantai coordinated Zhangjiagang steel arrivals with Shanxi ton-bag fertilizer consolidation to maximize stowage. The port used the Xiaobin fixed-point method for fertilizer bags and a gap-fill method for steel pipes, completing loading to a high standard.