Port of Busan — Daily Cargo Handled (Estimated)

Methodology

PortWatch's estimate of the cargo moved at the Port of Busan each day. For each ship that calls (container ships, dry bulk carriers, general cargo ships, roll-on/roll-off (ro-ro) ships and tankers), it estimates how full the ship is on arrival and on departure from its draft and dimensions; the change, times the ship's deadweight tonnage, is the cargo unloaded (PortWatch's "import") or loaded ("export"). A port call is counted when a ship enters the port's boundary. Calls of less than five hours with no change in the ship's draft are left out, so ships that stop only to anchor, refuel or take on supplies are not counted. IMF PortWatch builds it from the Automatic Identification System (AIS) position signals that ships broadcast, as collected by the UN Global Platform, following Arslanalp, Koepke and Verschuur, "Tracking Trade from Space" (IMF Working Paper 2021/225). CK Economics adds PortWatch's import and export estimates for each day; nothing else is changed. Cargo moved between ships at the port (transshipment) is counted when it is unloaded and again when it is loaded, so hub ports show more cargo than passes through their country. The series runs daily from 1 January 2019, with days in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). PortWatch adds new days about once a week, a few days behind, and may revise recent days as late signals arrive. Single days swing with ship arrivals, so totals over a week or a month show the trend more clearly. These are estimates modelled from ship movements, not customs or port records, and can differ from the port's own tonnage statistics.

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Source

International Monetary Fund, PortWatch, Daily Ports Data (Busan, port1065), with the University of Oxford; AIS data from the UN Global Platform: https://portwatch.imf.org/datasets/83b1bbc7b3354c5fb1f40673bb8f852e_0/about; import plus export, summed by CK Economics — figures as published on 16 October 2026.