By contrast, in the first quarter of this year, Chinese foreign trade increased to $974.6 billion, reflecting a higher growth rate than in 2012, while Chinese ports completed 800 million tons of cargo throughput, representing a growth rate that was 4.2 percentage points lower than in the same period last year. In March, container traffic at China’s above-scale ports was 15.29 million TEUs (twenty-foot equivalent units), with month-on-month growth 1.7 percentage points slower than in the previous two months.