Tianjin giant logistics hub twice Hong Kong’s size

BEIJING—Thousands of burned-out cars lie in neat rows alongside mountains of crushed shipping containers, the smoldering frontline to enormous explosions that paralyzed one of China’s most important ports and industrial zones late Wednesday.

The Binhai New Area in northern China, where the blasts killed scores of people and injured more than 700, is a giant logistics hub more than twice the size of Hong Kong.

It hosts auto plants, aircraft assembly lines, oil refineries and other service and production facilities, and describes itself as a “modern manufacturing and research base” on its website.

The area is home to the world’s second-fastest supercomputer, which was shut down as a precaution after the huge blasts.

According to the Qilu Evening News, the area is also a major automobile transshipment point where about 10,000 imported cars were destroyed, 2,748 from German manufacturer Volkswagen and more than 1,000 built by France’s Renault.

Tianjin is a major port for northern China, handling containers amounting to more than 14 million 6-meter equivalent units last year, according to the Binhai website.

Operations at the port were “basically paralyzed” by the blast, the official China Securities Journal reported.

Resources giant BHP Billiton—for which China is a crucial market—said in a statement that its iron ore discharge berths were undamaged, with the closest being 20 kilometers from the blast site.

But it said that “shipments and port operations have been disrupted” by the blast and that it was working with its customers “to minimize any potential impact.”

Europe’s Airbus also said it was assessing the effect on its port operations. It has an assembly line for its popular A320 aircraft in the area and said on Thursday that the blast was far from the facility and caused no immediate damage.

“The Airbus Tianjin site is far beyond the area of explosion. There is no impact on the employees and the facilities,” it told Agence Frace-Presse (AFP) in an e-mailed statement. “Operations at Airbus Tianjin run normally today.”

But it added: “The potential impact on logistics via Tianjin Port… is currently under investigation.”

Japanese auto giant Toyota has a joint-venture car plant in Binhai, but an executive with the operation said the factory was on summer vacation and was not affected in the explosion.

Neither Volkswagen nor Renault officials were immediately available to comment when contacted by AFP on Thursday.

The Binhai New Area covers 2,270 square km and has a coastline of 153 km, the website says.

It is focused on eight main industries including aerospace and aviation, electronics and information, equipment manufacturing, petrochemical and new energy and material.