China’s two major shipping lines involved in the long-haul East/West trade lanes are expanding services to increase market coverage as one of the largest containership capacity build-ups undertaken by lines gets underway this year.
China Shipping (CSCL) has reached a slot agreement with United Arab Shipping Co (UASC) that will give the Chinese line added presence on the Mediterranean-US East Coast trade. Starting from this month, CSCL will have slots on the MINA service jointly operated with Hanjin, which covers the Middle East, Indian Sub-continent, Mediterranean and US East Coast.
In exchange, UASC will increase its existing slot allocation on the CSCL-operated AEX7 service covering the Asia-Europe trade.
The CSCL Atlantic deal covers La Spezia, Genoa, Barcelona, Valencia, Algeciras, New York, Norfolk, Savannah, Algeciras, Valnecia and Algeciras. The port coverage also includes Khorfakkan, Karachi, Nhava Sheva, Jeddah and Port Said, but these ports are not included in the new slot agreement.
CSCL also has slots on the Zim-operated ZCA service covering the Med-US East Coast trade, which will remain in place.
Effectively, the new CSCL deal will give the line coverage of ports in the entire East/Central/West Mediterranean sector, and add to the already established ZCA service coverage, marketed by CSCL as the Med/America Express (MAX), which covers central and eastern Mediterranean.
CSCL is also set to start taking delivery of the first of eight 10,000 TEU vessels from October this year through May 2014. Deployment for this capacity has still not been finalised.
All eight CSCL vessels are under construction at shipyards in China, and together with a further order by Cosco Container Lines (Coscon) for eight 13,000 TEU vessels, are the largest containerships ever to be built in China.
The vessels involved in the Coscon order, are being built by Nantong Cosco KHI Ship Engineering Co, which is a joint venture between Cosco and Japan’s Kawasaki Heavy Industries.
The first of the eight vessels has just been delivered to Coscon, and will be deployed on the Asia-North Europe trade this month. All eight Cosco vessels will be in service on the Asia-North Europe trade by the beginning of the third quarter of 2014.
Cargonews Asia
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