NORASIA LAUNCHES FAST 4-SHIP PACIFIC SERVICE
Norasia will launch a second weekly transpacific
container service next month with four 1,400-TEU vessels and restructure its existing
service.
Starting Dec. 4, the new Pacific Southwest loop, operated with four
25-knot ships of relatively small capacity, will call at Hong Kong, Yantian, Keelung, Long
Beach, Oakland and Hong Kong again.
Norasia will be the only Pacific carrier to operate a weekly container
service with only four ships, with a round-voyage of 28 days. The norm for transpacific
services is to use five or six vessels of larger capacity.
Maersk Line also adopted the four-ship operating concept when it
launched a temporary transpacific weekly service during the summer. The TP6A service,
using four 1,800-TEU ships, was ended in early October.
Norasia said that its atypical PSW service will provide a transit time
from Hong Kong and Yantian to Long Beach of 12 days.
The 12-day eastbound transit will match the Hong Kong-to-Los
Angeles/Long Beach transit times of the fast services operated by the New World Alliance,
the Grand Alliance, the COSCO/Yangming/"K" Line alliance and the
Hanjin/DSR=Senator/Cho Yang alliance, according to ComPairData, the global shipping
database on the Internet at http://www.compairdata.com.
Norasia’s former "APX" transpacific service to and from
Vancouver, British Columbia, launched in May, has been renamed "Pacific
Northwest" and will now employ four ships of 1,400-TEU instead of six previously.
Calls at Yantian and Seattle, and possibly later Portland, will be
added to the PNW rotation, but direct calls at Laem Chabang, Port Kelang, Singapore and
Jakarta are being ended to shorten the vessel rotations.
The revised rotation of the PNW loop is Vancouver, Seattle, Yantian,
Hong Kong, Kaohsiung, Keelung, Busan, Vancouver and Seattle.
Transit times details of the Norasia services and of competing carrier services are
available online on the ComPairData database.
In a separate development, Norasia said that it is studying a next
generation of high speed ships of 40-knot capability.