CLARIFICATION: Maersk adjusting Oceania/Americas service
A U.S.-based spokesman for Maersk Line said that most of its customers using the Oceania-Americas (OC1) service will benefit from an upcoming rotation change, and questioned an item in Tuesday's Shippers' NewsWire that suggested that northbound service levels from Australia will be negatively impacted by the adjustments.
'We would also like to point out that Melbourne, which handles substantially higher export and import volumes, would have been a more representative and just choice than Sydney. In this case, you could have mentioned that Melbourne is only impacted by two days to Philadelphia, but in the same time will benefit from a five-day reduction in transit time to Newark. In addition, that transit times to Miami are reduced by four days from Sydney and eight days from Melbourne,' said Gordon Dorsey, corporate communications at Maersk's U.S. base in Giralda Farms, N.J.
'New Zealand is also served by our Oceania/Americas service and this fact seems to have been more or less lost in the article. We have improved the transit time from Auckland to Newark by nine days and to Philadelphia by five days.
'We acknowledge that certain selected port pairs will not experience improved transit times. However, a majority of customers stand to benefit from our restructured service, and enjoy fast and improved transit times. A few examples to the contrary cannot alter this fact,' Dorsey said.