Cargo traffic at Chinese ports in November fell 0.5 percent from a year ago, state media said Thursday, in yet a sign the global crisis is causing the nation's export-dependent economy to lose steam.
Cargo throughput at major Chinese ports last month was 460 million tonnes, said the China Communication News, which is run by the transport ministry.
"I can't remember a sluggish performance like this ever happening since I started working on these statistics in 2000," an official with the ministry's statistics department, who declined to be named, told AFP.
The drop is mainly due to flagging demand from the real estate and auto industries for iron ore and coal, which account for around 30 percent of China's overall port cargo traffic, the official said.
Shrinking demand from the United States and Europe for Chinese exports is another key reason, the official said.
China's exports dropped 2.2 percent in November from a year earlier, the first decline in more than seven years.
The Chinese economy, on the verge of officially becoming the world's third-largest, is likely to see growth slow to 7.5 percent in 2009, the worst performance since 1990, according to the World Bank.
