News / Hapag chief executive defends Gemini transhipment tactic

Hapag-Lloyd chief executive Rolf Habben Jansen said today he expected Asian export freight rates to continue to fall in the coming weeks – however, he trusted they would settle above pre-Red Sea crisis levels, which were “unsustainable”.

“After we initially saw quite a bit of panic in the market and, in our case, the bookings we received doubled and spot rates went up a lot, we now see them normalising. But I would expect them to remain above pre-crisis levels,” he said during a customer virtual live session this morning.

Hapag-Lloyd’s current planning is for the conflict in the Red Sea to last “another couple of months, but of course we don’t know that”, added Mr Habben Jansen.

“We are sailing at speeds we should not sail at,” he said, explaining that the company’s emissions from its vessels were significantly reduced in 2023, the carrier’s fleet emitting about 800,000 tonnes less of CO2. However, he advised that reduction targets were “not on track” this year, due to the longer transits and faster service speeds needed to re-route vessels around Africa.

As expected, Mr Habben Jansen fielded numerous questions on Hapag’s new Gemini vessel-sharing cooperation with Maersk, to commence in February next year, and on the VSA’s plans, set to be finalised in August/September, to adopt a hub & spoke strategy to improve schedule reliability.

“We are very confident that this model will work…but I can understand the concerns, we had those ourselves in the beginning” he said.

“Not everything is going to go by transhipment; it’s more of a movement towards more transhipment. Compared to what we see today, there will be about 10%-15% more cargo that will be transhipped, so it’s not a landslide shift. But we are making transhipment for those ports that are also served by transhipment today much more robust,” explained the CEO.

The key factor in Gemini’s hub & spoke concept is that the partners will have operational control over “most” of the hubs, but concerns have been raised by shippers and analysts about the reliability of the shuttle network and, specifically, their prompt working at spoke ports.

“We will have fixed berthing windows for all of those shuttles, and keep in mind that the shuttle is something else, unlike a feeder where typically you might see a couple of hundred boxes being moved. When we look at the shuttles, we could easily be talking of port calls where we have 4,000 to 5,000 teu being delivered to one port, and also a similar number being loaded. So I actually believe that, for the terminals, the shuttles will prove to be very attractive customers, because it’s a large move count and also simple, because the terminal will simply unload and load the ship for one, or ex/to a maximum of two other port calls,” said Mr Habben Jansen.

He said it “remained to be seen” what size of shuttle vessels would eventually be deployed on the hub & spoke operation, this would only become known “once the shuttle networks stabilise”.

Moreover, Mr Habben Jansen responded to criticism that, for example, shippers in France would no longer have direct calls, by confirming that the shuttles would operate every week rather than under current network operations, where, for instance, a call at Le Havre might be skipped on an ad hoc basis from a mainline schedule.