South Korean container shipping line HMM is doubling down on the growth of the Asia-South America east coast trade with the launch of a second service between the two regions.

The carrier announced today that it would launch the FL2 service between Asia and the South American east coast, via the Cape of Good Hope, in April, and would operate the service in conjunction with its Premier Alliance partner, ONE.

“With the introduction of the FL2, HMM will provide our customers with more efficient and reliable service, following Far East-India-Latin America (FIL) service, and we will continue to enhance our presence in the East Latin America market that has a high potential for future growth and development,” an HMM official said.

The carrier said the first voyage of the FL2 will depart from Busan “in the first week of April” and will have a round-voyage transit time of 77days, with the following port rotation: Busan-South China-Singapore-Rio Grande-Santos-Santa Catarina-Singapore-Hong Kong-Busan.

It has not disclosed any vessel details yet, although its existing FIL service offers some clues – the FIL has a round-trip voyage time of 84 days, equal to 12 weeks, and requires 12 vessels to maintain weekly ports calls.

In comparison with FL2, FIL also includes a call at the Indian east coast port of Kattupalli and has four calls in Brazil compared with the three proposed under FL2.

The service is also in cooperation with ONE, although the Japanese carrier is only a slot charterer and is assigned just 10% of loadable capacity, according to eeSea data, while average capacity of the FIL vessels is 6,100 teu.

It is thus expected that the FL2 will need 11 ships to maintain the weekly service, but it remains unknown how much tonnage each partner will assign to it.

In addition, HMM will offer a dedicated River Plate feeder service to Argentina and Uruguay, via Rio Grande, with more competitive transit times.

Find out about Asia-Europe and Transpacific contracting in this clip from The Loadstar’s podcast

Speaker: Henrik Schilling, managing director, global commercial development at Hapag-Lloyd

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