This week, EUROGATE Container Terminal Wilhelmshaven, Germany’s only deep-water port, has served for the first time the world’s largest container ship OOCL Germany with a capacity of 21,413 TEU. To welcome the vessel on her maiden voyage, the terminal’s employees arranged containers in the form of “21413” on the container stowage area near the berth where OOCL Germany was to be docked.

Mikkel Andersen, Managing Director of EUROGATE Container Terminal Wilhelmshaven, said at the welcome ceremony: “Although we are in the meantime witnessing the world’s largest container vessels at Wilhelmshaven on a weekly basis, each occasion is still something very special. We see this [call of OOCL Germany] as a sign that our customer OOCL is very happy with the performance of the container terminal.”

The OOCL Germany is the second in a series of six “G class” vessels ordered by OOCL to the Korean shipyard Samsung Heavy Industries. On 2 July 2017, EUROGATE Container Terminal Wilhelmshaven already welcomed the first ship of this class – OOCL Hong Kong. Later on, two more containerships joined the fleet of the shipping line: OOCL Japan and OOCL United Kingdom.

According to OOCL, these newbuildings are designed to be operationally efficient and with many advanced green features that will help meeting the future environmental requirements. For instance, the energy efficiency of these containerships not only satisfies the current Energy Efficiency Design Index (EEDI) baseline requirement, but is 48% better than the EEDI level set up by the International Maritime Organization up to 2025.

The OOCL Germany operates on the Asia-North Europe Loop 1 (LL1) service, with the following port rotation in a 77-day round trip: Shanghai / Ningbo / Xiamen / Yantian / Singapore / via Suez Canal / Felixstowe / Rotterdam / Gdansk / Wilhelmshaven / Felixstowe / via Suez Canal / Singapore / Yantian / Shanghai.