NORASIA LAUNCHES FAST 4-SHIP PACIFIC SERVICE

   Norasia will launch a second weekly transpacific container service next month with four 1,400-TEU vessels and restructure its existing service.
    Starting Dec. 4, the new Pacific Southwest loop, operated with four 25-knot ships of relatively small capacity, will call at Hong Kong, Yantian, Keelung, Long Beach, Oakland and Hong Kong again.
    Norasia will be the only Pacific carrier to operate a weekly container service with only four ships, with a round-voyage of 28 days. The norm for transpacific services is to use five or six vessels of larger capacity.
    Maersk Line also adopted the four-ship operating concept when it launched a temporary transpacific weekly service during the summer. The TP6A service, using four 1,800-TEU ships, was ended in early October.
    Norasia said that its atypical PSW service will provide a transit time from Hong Kong and Yantian to Long Beach of 12 days.
    The 12-day eastbound transit will match the Hong Kong-to-Los Angeles/Long Beach transit times of the fast services operated by the New World Alliance, the Grand Alliance, the COSCO/Yangming/"K" Line alliance and the Hanjin/DSR=Senator/Cho Yang alliance, according to ComPairData, the global shipping database on the Internet at https://www.compairdata.com.
    Norasia’s former "APX" transpacific service to and from Vancouver, British Columbia, launched in May, has been renamed "Pacific Northwest" and will now employ four ships of 1,400-TEU instead of six previously.
    Calls at Yantian and Seattle, and possibly later Portland, will be added to the PNW rotation, but direct calls at Laem Chabang, Port Kelang, Singapore and Jakarta are being ended to shorten the vessel rotations.
    The revised rotation of the PNW loop is Vancouver, Seattle, Yantian, Hong Kong, Kaohsiung, Keelung, Busan, Vancouver and Seattle.
Transit times details of the Norasia services and of competing carrier services are available online on the ComPairData database.
    In a separate development, Norasia said that it is studying a next generation of high speed ships of 40-knot capability.