Maersk Line said that due to “structural berthing constraints” in the Port of Gioia Tauro, it has decided to shift transshipment calls on some of its Mediterranean feeder services from the Italian port to Port Said in Egypt.
Calls at Gioia Tauro on the F10 Poti and F17 Thessaloniki-Black Sea services have been deleted. The change was made, the carrier said, “to limit the adverse impact of these constraints on our mainliner services and services through Gioia Tauro.”
The Poti Service calls weekly at Heraklion (Greece) and Poti, with three 650-TEU vessels. The Black Sea service calls weekly at Thessaloniki, Varna (Bulgaria), Constanta (Romania) and Ilyichevsk (Ukraine), with three 1,000-TEU vessels.
“As part of this redeployment, our Asia-Europe 6 (AE6) will call Port Said eastbound on the way to the Far East on a pro-forma basis,” Maersk said. “It will allow us to reroute volumes originating from Latin America, North America, North Europe and West Mediterranean, from Algeciras to Port Said. This will not only increase capacity on the Algeciras-Port Said corridor, but also protect transit times for most of our services, with the exception of cargo moving on our Apollo (East Coast South America service) and Scanmed (Intra-European) services.”
American Shipper