The ZCS liner service had employed 15 containerships with average capacity of 4,870 TEU that sailed between Asia, North America and the Mediterranean via the Panama Canal.
The service will be divided into two separate transatlantic and transpacific services. Several port calls will also be dropped and transit times improved, the Israeli container carrier said.
The ZCS-Pacific (ZCP) will operate with nine 5,000-TEU vessels in a rotation of Savannah, New York, Halifax, Kingston, Los Angeles, Oakland, Ningbo, Shanghai, Pusan, Balboa, Kingston and Savannah. That string will no longer offer calls in Da Chan Bay, Shenzhen or Hong Kong, but the company will continue to call those ports with other transpacific services. The new rotations will be gradually phased in, and the first ship in the new ZCP rotation, the Zim Bejing, will call Halifax on Aug. 10.
The ZCS-Atlantic (ZCA) will use six ships averaging about 4,000 TEUs with a rotation of Haifa, Piraeus, Genova, Tarragona, New York, Savannah, Kingston, Tarragona and Haifa. The ZCA service will not call Leghorn or Halifax. The first ship to call New York in the new ZCA rotation will be the Zim Qingdao on Aug. 7.
ZCS said the realignment will shorten transit times and improve long-term schedule reliability on these key east/west routes.
Zim operates all 15 ships. COSCO, China Shipping and Hapag-Lloyd are slot charterers on the transatlantic string, and China Shipping charters space on the transpacific string.
