To accelerate the upgrading of the shipping and logistics industry and promote the intelligent transformation of cross-border transportation, Shanghai Boxplus Information Technology Co., Ltd. (“Boxplus”) has leveraged its strengths in container IoT technology to collaborate with Yantai Zhonghan Ferry Co., Ltd. (“Yantai Zhonghan Ferry”). Together, the two companies are implementing intelligent upgrades across cross-border shipping routes and multimodal transportation scenarios, empowering traditional transport operations with technology and creating a benchmark for smart cross-border container logistics.
Yantai Zhonghan Ferry primarily operates China–Korea cross-border passenger and cargo liner services, combining both passenger transport and container freight operations. Its cargo business mainly focuses on dry containers and refrigerated containers, carrying a wide range of cross-border goods including electronics, daily consumer products, and cold-chain fresh products.
Compared with long-haul ocean shipping, Yantai Zhonghan Ferry’s routes feature shorter voyage durations, high sailing frequency, stricter timeliness requirements, and higher standards for cargo management precision. In recent years, the company has also expanded into multimodal transport routes connecting Korea to Central Asia, involving both sea and rail transportation. These operations involve multiple stages, longer logistics chains, and complex coordination among various stakeholders.
Under traditional operational models, these business scenarios faced several major challenges:
Difficulty in maintaining continuous tracking across different transportation modes, making end-to-end logistics visibility and container asset management extremely challenging; 
Complicated manual verification and inspection procedures requiring high labor input, with low operational efficiency and risks of delayed information updates or handover errors; 
Inability to promptly detect and warn of cargo abnormalities, making it difficult to meet the strict requirements of cross-border multimodal transport for timeliness, safety, and traceability. 
 

As a result, intelligent transformation became a key direction for improving operational quality and efficiency — and a core consensus reached between Boxplus and Yantai Zhonghan Ferry. Focusing on business pain points and urgent digitalization needs, the two parties steadily advanced their cooperation. In April 2025, Yantai Zhonghan Ferry began pilot testing Boxplus’s self-developed IBOX family products, carrying out product trials and scenario adaptation verification.
Based on the practical needs of Yantai Zhonghan Ferry’s two major business scenarios, the IBOX product family delivered highly targeted intelligent empowerment. With core functions including real-time positioning and tracking, cargo status monitoring, intelligent abnormality alerts, and data traceability, the solution successfully broke through the “information silo” challenges of traditional container transportation, bringing comprehensive operational transformation and value enhancement to Yantai Zhonghan Ferry.
On one hand, full-process visualized management replaced manual inspections and offline verification, reducing manpower requirements while improving operational refinement and container asset management efficiency. The solution also accurately met the China–Korea route’s demanding requirements for transportation timeliness and cargo management precision — for example, shortening container return confirmation times from days to minutes.
On the other hand, intelligent warning mechanisms enabled rapid response to transportation abnormalities, reducing cargo damage risks and strengthening logistics security. Meanwhile, full-chain accurate data improved customer service experiences and reinforced the company’s core competitiveness in cross-border transportation, accelerating its transition toward intelligent and digitalized operations.
Due to the outstanding results of the pilot program, the two companies officially launched commercial cooperation in October 2025 and rapidly expanded full-scale deployment. At present, Yantai Zhonghan Ferry has essentially achieved nearly 100% intelligent coverage of dry cargo containers and is steadily advancing toward full intelligent coverage of refrigerated containers as well. The company is actively building a comprehensive intelligent management system covering all container categories and the entire operational process, driving the intelligent upgrade of multimodal transportation through tangible implementation results.
The cooperation between Boxplus and Yantai Zhonghan Ferry represents not only a practical integration of IoT technology with cross-border transportation, but also a meaningful exploration of cultivating new productive forces and advancing intelligent transformation in the logistics industry.
Looking ahead, both parties will continue deepening technology adaptation and scenario innovation, continuously optimizing the application performance of the IBOX product family and refining smart logistics solutions tailored to cross-border multimodal transportation. Together, they aim to further enhance Yantai Zhonghan Ferry’s operational quality and efficiency while contributing greater momentum to the high-quality development of cross-border logistics and international trade cooperation.