The port of Hong Kong posted its highest monthly container throughput growth in December by handling 1.8 million TEU, a rise of 14.3 per cent over the same month last year.

But despite this late push, Hong Kong still saw annual volumes fall 2.5 per cent to 19.58 million TEU for 2016 as projected bringing its first sub-20 million TEU annual throughput since 2002 when the annual throughput totalled 19.1 million TEU.

In December, the main Kwai Tsing terminals saw a 12.7 per cent rise in throughput to 1.4 million TEU while the non-Kwai Tsing terminals handled 400,000 TEU in the same month, a rise of 20.2 per cent.

For the whole year however, the Kwai Tsing terminals saw volumes fall 2.4 per cent to 15.2 million TEU while the non-Kwai Tsing terminals saw throughput fall 2.8 per cent to 4.37 million TEU.