The Gemini Cooperation is adding three new calls on a joint Asia-Europe container service as port congestion in Northern Europe challenges the hub-and-spoke model championed by the shipping alliance.
Gemini partners Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd will change port rotations for their respective AE5 and NE4 services from Asia to “address fluctuating port congestion in Europe and ensure more consistent delivery,” Hapag-Lloyd said in an advisory Tuesday.
The original European rotation of the AE5/NE4 only included London Gateway and Germany’s Bremerhaven and Hamburg ports. Along with those existing calls, the services from September will make added stops at Aarhus in Denmark, Gothenburg in Sweden and Rotterdam in the Netherlands as their last three European calls.
Aarhus and Gothenburg had been previously served by Gemini using a shuttle service for transshipping from Bremerhaven.
The changes announced Tuesday include the AE5/NE4 services calling Hamburg before Bremerhaven.
While the Gemini partners have insisted their hub-and-spoke network could maintain reliable schedules and avoid blank sailings, Maersk said in a separate advisory Tuesday it was just as easy to unwind the network “to address challenges, predicted or not.” It added that the shuttle vessels serving Aarhus will be redeployed to “locations with an increased disruption risk to our customers’ business.”
Since April, Europe has experienced bouts of port congestion because of strong import demand, changes in container alliance structures and poor schedule reliability due to the ongoing longer transits around southern Africa. Other ocean carriers have had to switch their European port rotations to mitigate delays.
Busy spring at Hamburg
Hamburg, one of the harder-hit ports, saw an uptick in ship calls and vessel sizes through spring, according to data from Sea-web, a sister product of the Journal of Commerce within S&P Global. During April, 416 container ships called the port, Sea-web data shows, with total vessel capacity reaching 1.83 million TEUs, the highest in 12 months. In May, 421 container ships called Hamburg, totaling 1.8 million TEUs in capacity.
Details please refer to the JOC news.
Source: JOC