THE Alliance members Hapag-Lloyd, Ocean Network Express, HMM, and Yang Ming have finalized their network plans to deploy larger vessels on the Asia-Europe and trans-Atlantic trades in April 2023.
Hapag-Lloyd said a series of new fuel-efficient vessels of 23,500 TEU will begin to replace smaller vessels on the Asia-North Europe trade lane and will be integrated with megaships from ONE and HMM. Vessels of 14,000 to 15,000 TEU will be deployed on the Asia-Mediterranean trade and from Asia to the U.S. East Coast on services via the Suez and Panama canals.
In addition to offering more sustainable services, the move is also intended to deploy bigger vessels that make fewer port calls while cutting down on transshipment, Hapag-Lloyd CEO, Rolf Habben Jansen outlined in a media briefing.
“We have done a lot to simplify our network and will do more as we move forward, and that means less services with bigger ships. It is also important to simplify transshipment. We used to do transshipment in quite a few locations, but we want to consolidate that to 10 to 12 hubs around the world because we believe it makes our network more resilient,” he added.
The global orderbook currently stands at 6.6 million TEU, or almost 30% of the total fleet in service, according to data from S&P Global, parent company of the Journal of Commerce.
Source: Journal Of Commerce
