The VCFI was created as an initiative of the Port Authority of Valencia, and jointly developed by the PAV and Fundación Valenciaport. The index was designed to reflect the evolution of market rates for the export of full containers by sea from Valenciaport.  The VCFI aims to inform users about the evolution of export freight rates from Valencia, and to be the European reference for certain shipping routes from the Mediterranean. To that end, it uses a very similar methodology to the Shanghai Containerized Freight Index (SCFI).

The VCFI provides value-added information on shipping freight rates—a key factor in determining port competitiveness.  The publication of the VCFI represents a major change in the sector, by providing the port community with information that had previously been confidential.  This exercise in transparency seeks to help improve the decision-making of the different users of the port.

In the first stage, the VCFI consists of an aggregate composite index, but in subsequent methodological developments, sub-indexes will be constructed, which offer more detail disaggregated by the geographical areas identified in the construction of the index.  Specifically, the export destinations of Valenciaport have been grouped into 13 geographical areas that correspond to the main traffic corridors from Valencia. Within those areas, 42 ports have been selected. Those ports represent 60% of containerized export traffic from Valenciaport, and their rates will serve as a reference for the calculation of the index.  Specifically, the geographical areas represented in the VCFI are Eastern Mediterranean, Western Mediterranean, Atlantic Europe, Baltic States, Far East, Middle East, Atlantic US and Canada, Central America and Caribbean, Atlantic Latin America, West Africa, East Africa, Pacific Latin America and the Indian subcontinent.

The following panellists have participated in the index: