Spot rates surge again as carriers push through fresh July hikes
A series of container freight spot rate hikes and general rate increases implemented on 15 ...
Japanese carrier ONE and Premier Alliance partner HMM are to launch a new service between the western Mediterranean and West Africa in July, part of their strategy to push more volumes through the Algeciras transhipment hub.
The new string – marketed as MAX by ONE and MA2 by HMM – will see five 2,800 teu ships deployed on a port rotation of Algeciras-Tanger Med-Dakar-Tema-Lekki-Abidjan-Algeciras.
The first departure is scheduled to leave Algeciras in the second half of July.
A ONE customer advisory said the service had been designed to “provide more robust connectivity between Far East Asia, Northern Europe, and West Africa, via the Algeciras and Tangier Mediterranean hubs, ensuring reliable transit times and increased capacity”.
An HMM spokesperson added that the South Korean carrier was looking to leverage its ownership of Algeciras’s TTI facility, in which it holds a 51% stake, with CMA Terminals holding the remaining 49% following a partial divestiture by HMM in 2017.
“The MA2 service will serve as a strategic gateway, effectively linking HMM’s core main-haul services with the high-potential emerging markets of Africa,” they added.
The Premier Alliance strategy in recent months, especially its revised east-west network, has increasingly resembled the hub and spoke design of Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd’s Gemini Cooperation, with a far greater focus on transhipment hubs supported by feeder/shuttle services, and HMM said it had been expanding its fleet of smaller vessels as a result.
“To bolster its core hub-and-spoke strategy, HMM has secured a total of 24 feeder vessels in the last six months.
“This fleet expansion includes ten 2,800 teu ships ordered from HD Hyundai Heavy Industries in March, two 1,900 teu ships acquired from the market this year, and 12 1,800-2,700 teu vessels ordered last October,” it said.
Meanwhile, last June, TTI submitted its $150m phase two expansion project to the Algeciras port authority with the aim of increasing capacity to 2.1m teu by 2028 – a further 700,000 teu to be added in a potential third phase.
It would also appear that Algeciras this year could regain some of the transhipment market share it lost to competing regional hubs – the combined throughput of the TTI and Maersk terminals in the port was 4.74m teu last year, representing a 0.5% increase, although the port authority said it had seen a “light downturn in transhipment traffic”.
That could, change with the addition of the MAX/MA2 service, as well as a revision next month of Gemini’s Asia-Med Loop1, which will drop its call at Port Said and offer Mediterranean transhipment through Algeciras instead.
The move will see the overall round-trip distance, continuing via the Cape of Good Hope, decline by some 3,500 miles to offer a port schedule of Ningbo-Shanghai-Tanjung Pelepas-Algeciras-Koper-Rijeka-Algeciras-Sinagpore.
Get early access to The Loadstar’s AI report
Complete The Loadstar’s ‘State of AI in the Supply Chain’ survey — and receive the full report and data before release.
Comment on this article