Having suffered a decline of -14.0%, in 2023 the traffic of container in the port of Hong Kong marked the sixth year consecutive downturn. A traffic volume of 14.3 million TEUs last year, compared to almost 16.7 million TEU in 2022, which will probably not allow the port to rank as in 2022 in tenth place in the ranking of the world's top container ports: whether in 2023 also Rotterdam, the eleventh port on the list, is a significant contraction in the flow of containers passing on its docks, however, last year container traffic in Jebel Ali port was growing, increase that could allow the Middle Eastern airport to rise again two positions and occupy in 2023 the one previously held by Hong Kong. For Hong Kong, however, the glories of a distant past when it was one of the world's leading container ports, pre-eminence that began to erode in 2013 when it was slipped from third to fourth position in the ranking of container ports.

According to preliminary estimates, in the fourth quarter of 2023 alone container traffic in Hong Kong was almost 3.6 million TEUs, with a decrease of -12.2% on the last quarter of the previous year.