A container ship berths at Ningbo Zhoushan Port in Ningbo, East China's Zhejiang province. [Photo/IC]

Nine foreign trade service companies in Ningbo made the list of Zhejiang's Top 30 Comprehensive Foreign Trade Service Companies, which was issued by the Department of Commerce of Zhejiang Province recently.

Ningbo was home to the largest number of companies to make the list, said an official from the city's Bureau of Commerce.

Ningbo was one of the first cities in China to encourage companies to develop comprehensive foreign trade services and now has around 10 major foreign trade service companies.

It launched a policy to support such companies in 2015, and one of them was honored as a national pilot foreign trade service company the next year, the first in the Yangtze River Delta region to receive the honor.

The growth in export value of local foreign trade services has become one of the most important driving forces behind Ningbo's overall export growth.

In the first five months of 2019, the export value of local comprehensive foreign trade services reached 8.97 billion yuan ($1.31 billion), up 16.5 percent year-on-year, 6 percent higher than the city's overall export growth rate.

Each of these companies serve more than 3,000 foreign trade enterprises, 70 percent of which are micro, small or medium-sized local enterprises, while the remaining 30 percent of them lie outside the city, including surrounding provinces, such as Anhui and Jiangsu.