News / Grape demand: carriers line up for a bite as South African export season begins

Photo: VesselFinder

South Africa’s grape export season has begun, and ocean carriers are lining up for a slice of the action.

Below is how the exporting season works out for exporters:

Source: Fresh Produce Exporters Forum

“You didn’t hear this from the grapevine – you got the Grape Connect from Hapag-Lloyd!” quipped a customer advisory from the German carrier this week, advertising the launch of its Grape Connect product promising “weekly sailings from Port Elizabeth and Durban, with a straight connection to Rotterdam in just 25 days”.

However, “straight” should not be misinterpreted as “direct” as the advisory further explains: “We’ve built this connection with our South America-Africa Triangle (SAT) and West Europe-West Africa (WWA) services.”

Bear with us – there’s some complicated network designs going on here. The SAT service is operated in cooperation with Maersk and CMA CGM, terming it the WAFEX and Africa4 services respectively. Originally a North-South Europe-West Africa-South Africa-South America east coast service with a long list of calls, it was trimmed earlier this year and now operates southern transatlantic port rotation of Parangua-Itajai-Santos-Durban-Luanda-Tema.

Meanwhile, Hapag-Lloyd’s standalone WWA service has a port rotation of Antwerp-Le Havre-Lisbon-Tanger Med-Tema-Pointe Noire-Luanda, suggesting that South Africa grape exports will subject to a transhipment connection either in Tema or Luanda.

In turn this means that the SAT service will need to inject a call at Port Elizabeth, most likely after Durban.

“Concretely, the grapes will initially travel on the ‘SAT’ service which will add a new call at Port Elizabeth. The fruit will then be transhipped in Luanda onto the ‘WWA’ service which will add a new call at Rotterdam,” a research note from Alphaliner said today.

In addition, the 25-day transit time advertised by Hapag-Lloyd also implies a transhipment move, because MSC is set to launch a weekly Eastern Cape Express Service at the beginning of January, to coincide with the “beginning of the grapes season to meet the demand for reefers throughout the season”.

The service will feature a port rotation of Port Elizabeth (Gqeberha)-Walvis Bay-Rotterdam-London Gateway-Antwerp and advertises a 21-day transit time to the Dutch gateway, some four days quicker than the Hapag-Lloyd product.

Both companies, however, stressed the advantages of Port Elizabeth as an export point for grapes, compared to Cape Town.

“This new route offers an express service from the Eastern Cape region and Namibia to major commercial centres in Europe without a stop in Cape Town, enhancing transit times and giving our customers more direct options,” an MSC advisory said.

However, Alphaliner’s analysis of the new service suggests that it is effectively a seasonal extension to the carriers’ existing North Europe-West Africa services.

“The ‘Eastern Cape Express’ is expected to be provided by the extension of MSC’s North Europe-West Africa ‘NWC-Morocco-WAF’ service to South Africa, with a new rotation that will include not only Port Elizabeth and Walvis Bay but also new calls at Lome, Pointe Noire, Luanda as well as London Gateway,” it said.

The “new” service is scheduled to launch with the departure of the 3,000 teu MSC Nederland III from Port Elizabeth/Gqeberha on 3 January, and Alphaliner added that the loop would be operated by “a fleet of ships of 2,500-3,500 teu”.

In a related development, MSC’s services in the region are likely to be further bolstered after it finally took over a 25-year concession to operate the New Container terminal in the Namibian port of Walvis Bay at the beginning of this month.

Control of the new facility will give the carrier access to considerable amounts of terminal capacity, which is in short supply elsewhere in the region and could give MSC the ability to develop a significant new transhipment hub for its operations.

According to the eeSea liner database, the port handles some 160,000 teu per year, but offers an overall capacity of 1.1m teu annually across its two terminals.

The terminal was officially inaugurated in 2019 but Namport – the country’s port authority – decided to concession it off to a private operator with capital to invest further.