The MSC Ariane will not be arriving at the Port of Los Angeles on April 24 as scheduled.
The container ship “had to stop at sea due to an engine issue due to bad quality of fuel” last Friday while en route from Xiamen, China, to LA, MSC Mediterranean Shipping Co. said in an updated customer advisory. “The vessel has been diverted to Wakayama, Japan, for repairs.”
MSC did not respond by publication time to an inquiry regarding the needed repairs. There was no indication that any cargo aboard the container ship, with a capacity to carry 13,050 twenty-foot equivalent units, had been affected.
MSC also did not attribute the Ariane’s delay to the engine problem. “Due to the congestion in the Los Angeles area, we are now expecting a schedule adjustment to this original berthing plan,” the ocean carrier said in Tuesday’s advisory.
The Ariane, built in 2012 and sailing under the flag of Panama, is deployed on the Pearl service, which also includes calls at Vung Tau, Vietnam, Hong Kong and Yantian, China.
Notably, the Maersk Essen is also deployed on MSC’s Pearl service. The Essen lost 750 containers in mid-January while it too was en route from Xiamen to LA. In that case, the cause was blamed on a “rough sea encounter.”
Maersk and MSC are members of the space-sharing 2M Alliance. Large-volume importers using the Pearl service, according to FreightWaves data, include Adidas, Amazon, Ikea, Levi Strauss, Puma, Williams-Sonoma, Wolverine World Wide and Yokohama Tire.
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Click here for more American Shipper/FreightWaves stories by Senior Editor Kim Link-Wills.