News / Cape Town loses Maersk/CMA CGM call as carriers battle port delays

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After being hit with a series of port congestion surcharges this month, South African shippers and forwarders this week lost another direct call at Cape Town, as carriers continue to struggle to maintain schedules due to extended waiting times at the nation’s ports.

Maersk told customers today it was reorganising its Asia-West/South Africa network with a rejigged FEW6 service between Northern China and south-west Africa with two calls at Cape Town dropped.

“The updated FEW6 service will focus on the main south-west African ports, with a new call to Kribi. A significant change to this service will be the delinking of Cape Town coverage to enable quicker transit times of up to seven days between the south-west African ports and Asian ports,” said the carrier.

The service is operated jointly with CMA CGM and Cosco, with Hapag-Lloyd and OOCL as slot charters, and Cape Town shippers will instead be served by a dedicated feeder service between Cape Town and the Mauritian transhipment hub of Port Louis.

“With the removal of Cape Town from the FEW6, a brand-new service, the Cape Town Express, will be launched,” added Maersk. “The new service caters for consistent cargo movement between Port Louis and Cape Town. In Port Louis, there will be connectivity from and to Asia using the Safari service.”

The Safari service is also a joint operation with CMA CGM and Cosco, and will have an updated port rotation of Shanghai-Ningbo-Shekou-Tanjung Pelepas-Port Louis-Durban-Port Louis-Tanjung Pelepas.

Mike Walwyn, director of maritime affairs at the Southern African Association of Freight Forwarders (SAAFF), told The Loadstar the new service structure could hit some of South Africa’s critical export industries.

“The point is that these new schedules have been introduced to allow the carriers to maintain their global schedule integrity. By using efficient ports like Port Louis as hubs, they can tranship South African cargo using feeder vessels and thereby not interfering with the schedules of their mainline vessels.

“Obviously, the effect of that will be to lengthen transit times and increase costs for cargo owners.

“Apart from the fact that this development reduces our ports to the status of minor wayports, it could have a serious impact on some key industries. For example, we are about to go into our peak fruit exporting period, where shelf life is critical, so the extended voyage time could have a major negative impact on the final prices realised, not to mention the negative cash flow implications,” he added.

The reduced service also comes on top of mounting costs. This month, MSC announced a $210 per teu port congestion surcharge (PCS) for all South African ports beginning on 3 December, while Hapag-Lloyd will introduce a similar, $200, PCS on 8 December.

“It’s not often you hear me accepting more revenue-collecting attempts from shipping lines, but in this case they have justification because the productivity and general state of our ports has declined to the extent that congestion surcharges became inevitable,” said Mr Walwyn.

In response to the crisis engulfing South Africa’s state-owned port and rail freight operator Transet, the government has set up the National Logistics Crisis Committee, of which SAAFF is a member.

“You will appreciate that our industry and others are involved in urgent and critical negotiations with government in an attempt to rectify the situation and restore our ports to their former productivity levels, but as you will know this will not happen overnight,” Mr Walwyn explained.