News / TPM24: ONE CEO Nixon bullish on 'life after Hapag' – with new solo services

The CEOs at THEA's launch: left to right: Jae-hoon Bae (HMM), Rolf Habben Jansen (Hapag-Lloyd), Jeremy Nixon (ONE), Bronson Hsieh (Yang Ming)

Two ocean carrier CEOs affected by alliance divorce appeared in consecutive sessions on the first conference day of the S&P Global TPM24 event in Long Beach on Monday.

First up, as part of a panel session discussing the outlook for container shipping, was ONE CEO Jeremy Nixon, who referred to a “positive impact” from the 2025 consortia changes which, in addition to the demise of the 2M, will see THE Alliance’s founding lead line Hapag-Lloyd leave the VSA next February to partner with Maersk in the Gemini Cooperation.

Mr Nixon played down the impact of the shock announcement of Hapag’s resignation from THEA, particularly for the transpacific, where, he pointed out, the German carrier had “a relatively small share” of alliance tonnage deployed on the tradelane.

Moreover, he was bullish on ‘life after Hapag’, advising that ONE would “launch new independent services outside THEA during 2024”.

On finding a replacement alliance member, or exploring some other cooperation, ONE is clearly keeping all options open. Intriguingly, Mr Nixon said there were “a number of discussions under way and, early next month, we will have an update on that”.

On the subject of the transpacific contracting season, he defended the spike in spot rates from Asia to the US west coast, which have skyrocketed by around 170% since December, due the contagion effect of the Red Sea crisis.

“I don’t think freight rates today are that crazy,” said Mr Nixon. And as far as the looming threat of the US east coast labour contract coming to an end in October and the rhetoric from the ILA union on industrial action, Mr Nixon said this had been a “key issue” in new contract discussions so far.

“Customers will try to ship a little bit more to the west coast this year,” he said.

Hapag-Lloyd CEO Rolf Habben Jansen was next on stage, in conversation with Journal of Commerce and S&P Global VP Peter Tirschwell.

It had clearly been the turn of ONE to blindside Hapag-Lloyd with the announcement of the Japanese carriers’ plans for “independent services outside THEA in 2024” – Mr Habben Jansen apparently only learned of the intentions at the same time as the audience.

Meanwhile, the jury is out on whether the hub & spoke strategy of Gemini, which forms a central part of Maersk and Hapag’s USP to target 90% schedule reliability, will succeed.

“It looks pretty good on paper,” noted Alphaliner senior analyst Jan Tiedemann, “the question is, will it work in practice?”.

Indeed, some industry veterans recall hub & spoke operations that did not work properly, with export boxes missing the mothership connection and imports being stranded at the hub port for days. So shippers have generally preferred the certainty of a direct call.

“The proof of the pudding will be in the eating,” said Mr Haben Jansen, adding “we have to prove that it works”, and conceding there was a lot of scepticism in the industry.

“There was also some scepticism when we talked to Maersk about hub & spoke,” he added, but said the new partners’ planners were convinced that the shuttle operation could be implemented efficiently, in that with fewer main ports, there was “less possibility that things will go wrong”.