TRANSATLANTIC CARRIERS WORK ON CAPACITY REDUCTION PLAN

TRANSATLANTIC CARRIERS WORK ON CAPACITY REDUCTION PLAN    Transatlantic carriers will announce a plan to reduce capacity in the next few months, a senior executive of CP Ships said on Friday.
   Frank Halliwell, chief operating officer of the CP Ships group and head of Americana Ships, said that his group and other carriers were considering “ideas to rationalize capacity.”
   “If you look at the east/west trades, there have been attempts at capacity management,” he commented. The capacity rationalization plan on the Asia/Europe trade has been “moderately successful” and another plan on the transpacific route has been less effective, Halliwell said.
   “I foresee something happening in the transatlantic… in the near term,” he said.
   CP Ships — the parent company of transatlantic carriers Lykes Lines, TMM Lines, Contship Containerlines, Canada Maritime and Cast, is the largest transatlantic container shipping group. The group’s carriers are cooperating with the Grand Alliance shipping lines P&O Nedlloyd, Hapag-Lloyd, OOCL and NYK, having formed the transatlantic trade’s largest cooperative consortium.
   Halliwell said that regulatory restrictions on capacity management would be taken into consideration. However, he would not comment on which other shipping lines would be involved in the plan, and did not say whether the plan would be implemented individually by each carrier or as a group.