THE Ocean Alliance has been making
amendments to its Day 4 product on its east-west trade network, with the
changes set to be implemented from this April to coincide with the
delivery of new mega box ships.
In a notice to customers, Cosco subsidiary OOCL said it had been "working very closely" with its Ocean Alliance
partners on "fine-tuning adjustments", reported The Loadstar, UK.
Alphaliner said the new offering from the alliance partners, CMA CGM, Cosco (including OOCL) and Evergreen,
was "very similar" to the current Day 3 product, the main change being
the termination of an Asia to east Mediterranean string, removing one of
the five loops on this tradelane.
The service was launched in April 2017 as part of the Ocean Alliance's
Day 1 product and will come to a halt on January 24 after the sailing
from Qingdao of the 5,364-TEU Ever Useful.
Elsewhere, Hamburg is being dropped at the expense of Antwerp on the
NEU5/FAL3 Asia-North Europe loop, which delivers a blow to the German
port that had been clawing back business lost to Benelux ports during
years of inertia over the river Elbe deepening talks.
The Ocean Alliance says the capacity deployed on the revised network
will be the same as in Day 3 - 3.8 million TEU - however, Alphaliner
said the partners would likely raise capacity on several of their
services after newbuild mega box ships and other large tonnage join the
global cellular fleet this year.
"CMA CGM is expected to deploy all nine LNG-powered 23,112 TEU ships on
the flagship FAL1 (NEU4) Asia-North Europe service, starting from June,"
said Alphaliner.
"These ships will join three 20,954 TEU units and gradually replace the
other nine ships, of 15,000-17,800 TEU. The total capacity of the
service will be increased from 17,600 TEU to 22,500 TEU once all the new
ships are delivered by the first quarter of 2021," the consultancy
said.
CMA CGM has an orderbook of 30 ships with a total capacity of 468,000
TEU. Taiwan's Evergreen, which has 555,000 TEU for 68 ships on its
orderbooks is anticipated to phase-in ten 12,000 TEU vessels this year
on the Asia-US east coast tradelane, bumping up the average
containership capacity on the alliance's AUE/AWE2 loop from 10,000 TEU
to 12,000 TEU.
"These changes are expected to trigger vessel cascading programmes that
will see smaller ships of 5,000-7,000 TEU currently deployed on various
[Ocean Alliance] routes replaced by larger ships," said Alphaliner.
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