News

APM Terminals Maasvlakte II’s new rail service between its Rotterdam terminal and Venlo, a key logistics hub on the Dutch-German border is proving popular. Following the success of the initial five-times-per-week service, plans are already in place to scale this up to 14 times per week over the coming weeks.

A 24-hour national labour strike is planned on Jul 24, in all Italian ports and all transportations. The planned strike is subject to confirmation in the coming days.

With further development to its existing solid European products, Ocean Network Express (ONE) has announced the launch of a new direct service, the Indian Ocean Service 3 (IO3), which covers South East India, Mediterranean, and North Europe. The new product will offer new port coverage and boost reliability to a wider range of direct port call options to ONE’s valued customers. It will also further expand ONE’s already comprehensive service offerings and allow its clients to enjoy greater choice while bringing efficiency and additional values to the supply chain. The first sailing of the loop is now expected to start from 26th October 2019. IO3: Indian Ocean Service 3 Rotation: Visakhapatnam – Krishnapatnam – Chennai – Tuticorin – Colombo – Cochin – Damietta – Piraeus – Rotterdam – London Gateway – Hamburg – Antwerp – Le Havre – Damietta – Jeddah – Colombo – Visakhapatnam (Fixed day weekly service, 63-day rotation)

APM Terminals has become the first Peruvian port to introduce a customer platform that logs, streamlines and coordinate General Cargo operations in the port of Callao. During the pilot phase, the platform, which was developed together with maritime and customs agents, enabled users to complete transactions 67% faster and operations were completed 12% faster. APM Terminals Callao invested nearly USD 1 million in the implementation of MOST, a new state-of-the-art platform that can be used by maritime agents, customs agencies and carriers, among others. MOST can be used to register cargo and view real-time information, make online payments and generate authorizations for the loading and unloading of all types of General Cargo, from anywhere, anytime. The platform is a clear milestone in the efficient management of port logistics using world-class technology.

Australia’s biggest port operator DP World is telling dock workers that 200 jobs will be made redundant in Sydney and Melbourne as the company grapples with stalled union negotiations and growing commercial pressures. DP World Australia’s chief operating officer Andrew Adam told The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald that the company had no choice but to shed 200 staff – 100 in Melbourne (on top of 50 stevedores who will leave the business this week) and 100 in Sydney. About 1800 stevedores work at the company. “It’s a decision not taken lightly, but we’ve lost volume and market share since last year,” Mr Adam said.

The Mexican government is upgrading the Port of Manzanillo, one of the country’s main Pacific Ocean ports, with four new terminals. The terminals will include a specialized container facility with capacity to handle 1.75 million TEUs per year, another for agricultural bulk, one more for mineral bulk and one specialized for hydrocarbons.

Middle East-India-Africa Express (MIAX) to start operations in October 2019 Hapag-Lloyd is expanding its African liner services and will offer its MIAX (Middle East-India-Africa Express) service starting in October 2019. It will include direct connections between the Arabian Gulf, India, Colombo (Sri Lanka), La Réunion, South Africa and West Africa.

Canada’s arctic port of Churchill is set to resume its first grain shipments since 2015 after a group backed by investor Prem Watsa stepped in last year to buy the facility and a related rail line linking the northern town with the rest of Manitoba. The 88-year-old port on the shores of Hudson’s Bay will resume operations in the next few months, reducing by several days the shipping time to deliver grains to Europe and the Middle East across the Atlantic Ocean.

In the largest commercial operation of its kind in the history of Saudi Arabia, King Abdullah Port has received 28 state-of-the-art Liebherr cranes to start the expansion of the container terminals. The latter was decided through a MoU signed with National Container Terminal on the day the port was officially inaugurated in the presence of the Crown Prince Muhammad Bin Salman last February. The new cranes include 20 gantry cranes and 8 ship-to-shore (STS) cranes, which are the largest of their kind, with an outreach of 70 m (25 rows) and a safe working load of 65 t. The cranes that were supplied in this deal will join their operational counterparts in the port. They are the largest cranes exported by Liebherr and can serve mega container ships easily and seamlessly.

ICTSI subsidiary ICTSI Americas BV has acquired 100% of the shares of Libra Terminal Rio S.A. (Libra Rio) to run the Terminal de Contêineres 1 (T1Rio) container terminal in the Port of Rio, Brazil. Libra Rio holds the concession rights to operate, manage and develop T1Rio and was acquired by ICTSI from Boreal Empreendimentos e Participações SA. The deal to take over the port container terminal concession was disclosed to the Philippine Stock Exchange, reported Manila Standard. ICTSI said: “The parties will work to sign a share purchase agreement in due course.” Concession until 2048

Two and a half years after taking over the operations of the Multi-Purpose and the New Cruise Terminals at the Limassol port, DP World Limassol on Wednesday presented the upgrades and investments in infrastructure and equipment. The company said that it had acquired brand-new equipment in January 2019 as part of an ongoing upgrade of the Limassol port infrastructure. The new machinery was put into operation in March 2019, following intensive training of staff and has contributed to speeding up operations at the Multi-purpose port terminal. More specifically, the new equipment includes: A new, high-tech LHM 420 mobile harbour crane, with maximum lifting capacity of 144 tons and radius of 54 metres enhancing the efficient handling and transportation of bulk cargo, general cargo, containers, oil and gas.

Nippon Express France, S.A.S. (hereinafter, “NEF”), a subsidiary of Nippon Express Co., Ltd., has opened a Tanger Med Logistics Center in the Moroccan port of Tanger Med, and this Center began operations on Wednesday, June 26, as NEF’s second location in Morocco.

US-based McDermott International has received a contract to provide front-end engineering design (FEED) services for the Sohar LNG Bunkering Project in Oman. The project has an aim of establishing Oman as a regional LNG bunkering hub capable of supplying LNG as a fuel to marine vessels. Under the deal, awarded by Total Oman E&P Development B.V. in partnership with Oman Oil Company S.O.A.C., the scope of work during the FEED phase includes fully defining the onshore mid-scale LNG facilities and preparing a competitive tender for the engineering, procurement, supply, construction and commissioning phase.

Maiden call by Marella Cruises in Kiel. In the early Tuesday morning (16th July) the cruise ship Marella Explorer (see also CruiseMapper) berthed in the port of Kiel with 2,000 mostly anglo-phone passengers on-board. The vessel follows an itinerary of 14 days leading it all across the Baltic Sea. It started in Newcastle on 13th July and will conclude its cruise in the same port on 27th July.

BEST terminal in the Port of Barcelona has recently increased its storage and connection capacity for refrigerated containers, from 1,600 connection points up to 2,750, an increase of 70%, making it one of the terminals with the most connections for refrigerated containers in the whole of the Mediterranean area.

NAMPORT’s new container terminal will be officially inaugurated on 2 August, and normal operations are expected to start on it on 24 August. The new terminal, constructed at a cost of N$4 billion, is expected to increase container handling capacity from the current 355 000 twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs) to up to 1 005 000 TEUs. Firstly, there will be a shutdown on 17 August of container operations in the port to start relocations to the new terminal. The equipment to be relocated include rubber-tired gantries and mobile harbour cranes, while reach stackers, haulers and forklifts will move the containers.

The 300-hectare shipyard of Hanjin Philippines may be taken over by several shipping companies that would transform it into a major global port, Trade Secretary Ramon Lopez said in a chance interview recently. He said the shipyard could be a sprawling multipurpose mixed-use port facility that would be jointly operated by several players. This, he said, is one of the proposals received by Hanjin creditors for the development of the shipyard after Hanjin Philippines declared bankruptcy early this year. “It’s a good masterplan that has been proposed and it is targeted to be implemented this year,” Lopez said. He declined to name the companies but hinted that these include foreign players. Another source said creditors are in negotiations with an American and a Japanese company. Officially, Hanjin has fully shut down just this month, ending the last of its remaining maintenance operations, sources said. As of this writing, the creditors have not made any official announcement yet regarding the final plans for the shipyard.

The Alcantara container terminal in Lisbon announced this week plans to invest 122 million euros (137.4 million U.S. dollars) by 2038 to modernize and streamline the operational activity of its port infrastructure.

July 16: A fire at Iraq’s southern Basra offshore oil export terminal briefly halted crude loading operations on Tuesday but was put out and loading resumed, Iraqi oil officials said. The fire occurred in a residential section of the terminal accommodating workers and did not directly damage oil infrastructure, a port official and sources in the Basra Oil Company said. “Fire erupted at around 5 am (0200 GMT) and it was put out in two hours. We had to halt crude loading operations for three hours for safety issues,” said a port official who was speaking from the Basra port. Basra port has restored full operations with no stoppage at the oil exports jetties, said a statement from the state-run Basra Oil Company. Four workers suffered minor injuries, it added.

Norwegian shipping and tank terminal company Odfjell SE has finalized the sale of its stake in Odfjell Terminals Jiangyin (OTJ), China. The indirect 55% equity interest in OTJ has been sold by Odfjell Terminals Asia Holding to Yangzijiang Shipbuilding (Holdings) for a price of about USD 46 million.