Port of Tampa gains new container service

Linea Peninsular began operating a weekly container shipping service this month between the Mexican ports of Altamira and Progreso, and Tampa.    It’s not an all-water service with hundreds of containers from Asia taking advantage of the newly expanded Panama Canal, but the Port Tampa Bay is glad to have its newest customer.
   The Florida port announced Wednesday that Linea Peninsular this month began operating a weekly container shipping service between the Mexican ports of Altamira and Progreso, and Tampa.
   The ocean transit time is about two days and provides companies another option to rail and truck for trade between Mexico and the United States. The service can also accommodate refrigerated containers and breakbulk and project cargoes.
   “Mexico is already one of Port Tampa Bay’s top trading partners and we see significant potential to expand our containerized business with Mexico, including for such commodities as food and beverage products, consumer goods and construction and building materials,” CEO Paul Anderson said in a statement.
   “We are very excited to add Port Tampa Bay to our rotation” David Humphreys, CEO of Linea Peninsular, said. “We have wanted to do this for quite some time as the large consumer market in the Tampa Bay I-4 corridor market has become the primary distribution center hub for Florida. Customers have been pushing us to add a Tampa call and the response has been great. We also see lots of potential to assist companies who are currently trucking their business between Mexico and Florida and to help them save money and transit time by converting to the safety and security of an all-water delivery.”
   Linea Peninsular also operates between Altamira, Progresso, Houston and Panama City, Fla., where it is headquartered, with small vessels.
   Port Tampa Bay, for the better part of a decade, has been trying to attract new container lines with limited success. It handled 56,742 TEUs in fiscal year 2015, ended Sept. 30. In the first half of the fiscal year through March, container traffic was down 13 percent to 23,236 TEUs.
   The port authority and terminal operator Ports America have ambitious plans to quadruple the size of the existing terminal to 160 acres if enough container business materialize.