New Maersk/MSC service to use Panama Canal

Service will be Maersk’s first to call at Jacksonville.    Maersk Line and Mediterranean Shipping Co. will begin calling the Port of Jacksonville’s Blount Island Marine Terminal in July with a new service from North China and South Korea.
   “What better way to illustrate JAXPORT’s increasingly visible role in international trade than to welcome the world’s largest container line,” said Roy Schleicher, JAXPORT’s executive vice president and chief commercial officer.
   Maersk is calling the service, which will transit the Panama Canal, the TP10 and MSC is calling it the New Everglades service.
   The string will deploy ten vessels with an average capacity of 4,500 TEUs.
   Michael White, president of Maersk Line North America, said the TP10 service “provides greater convenience and enhanced transit times for shippers doing business between Northern Asia and South Korea and Northern Florida and the U.S. Southeast.”
   The TP10 will have a port rotation of Savannah, Charleston, Jacksonville, Miami, Xingang, Qingdao, Busan, Cristobal, and Savannah.
   The decision to route an Asian service through the Panama Canal is a reversal of sorts for Maersk.
   Back in 2013, the carrier combined a string that used the Panama Canal with one that was routed through the Suez Canal in order to use larger ships and take advantage of the economy of scale provided by larger vessels.
   At the time, a Maersk executive said it was “difficult for me to see how any service going through the Panama Canal that serves Asia to the U.S. East Coast could possibly be making money.”
   Of course, bunker costs have fallen sharply since last summer and carriers appear to be positioning themselves for the eventual opening of the new locks in Panama Canal next year, which will allow for much larger ships to use the waterway.
   Drewry said last month although a Suez routing for the coverage of the Asia-East Coast North America trade has become increasingly popular in the past few years, five of six recently announced services between the two regions will use the Panama Canal.
   “That might suggest that the carriers have already started jockeying for position in preparation for when the widened Panama Canal opens next year,” the London-based consultant wrote.