Eurogate has announced that since April, 2017 six more container shipping lines will call at its Wilhelmshaven terminal in Germany’s only deep-water JadeWeserPort.
The six lines are COSCO Shipping, OOCL, CMA CGM and Evergreen forming the newly established OCEAN Alliance, as well as Hamburg Süd and Hyundai Merchant Marine.
The OCEAN Alliance has included Wilhelmshaven into its “Asia–North Europe 1” service rotation: Shanghai – Ningbo – Xiamen – Yantian (Shenzhen) – Singapore – Felixstowe – Rotterdam – Gdansk – Wilhelmshaven – Felixstowe – Singapore – Yantian (Shenzhen) – Shanghai and will initially call at the terminal once a week with some of the world’s largest container vessels of over 18,000 TEUs. According to Alphaliner, the service “will deploy 11 ships averaging 20,000 TEU, comprising 6 newbuildings of the OOCL Hong Kong type of 21,100 TEU capacity and COSCO’s 5 18,980 TEU vessels of CSCL Globe type”.
Hamburg Süd and Hyundai Merchant Marine will start operating services via Wilhelmshaven through their recently initiated slot charter cooperation with the 2M Alliance of Maersk Line and MSC.
The 2M Alliance has been calling at Wilhelmshaven since it was formed in 2015.
Eurogate Container Terminal Wilhelmshaven is located at the western coast of the Weser river mouth. Opened in 2012, it was designed to provide additional port capacity in the region, as the opposite located Bremerhaven has little room left to grow. However, the new terminal of 2.7 mln TEU annual capacity has been underutilized so far. In 2016, its throughput was 481,720 TEU, although this marked a growth of 13% over 2015, due to the rising traffic on the 2M Alliance twice weekly Asia-Europe services.
Therefore, the arrival of the 6 new lines is by all means a significant boost to Wilhelmshaven. Eurogate finds it “especially gratifying that so many shipping lines have come to recognize the nautical advantages offered by the port”. With the draught of up to 16.5m unrestricted nautical access, independently of the tide, it is an ideal transhipment hub for feeder services to Scandinavia, the Baltic and Russia.
Michael Blach, Chairman of the Eurogate Group Management Board, says: “This is a significant success that we have worked long and hard to achieve. The fact that two of the three major shipping alliances will visit Germany’s only deep-water port from spring 2017 will give Wilhelmshaven a new growth spurt – also with respect to the portfolio of additional transport and logistics services.”
Eurogate, Europe’s largest container terminal operator, owns 70% of the terminal, with the remainder held by APM Terminals.
