Terry Hutson
MEDITERRANEAN SHIPPING Company (MSC) is busy gearing itself for a direct South Africa - Far East service, possibly in 2002. In the interim the fortnightly feeder service between Fremantle and Singapore that connects with MSC's weekly SA-Australia service has been doubled to a named-day weekly service offering improved transit times for SA-Far East traffic.
Captain Salvatore Sarno, chairman of MSC in South Africa, told FTW that although the existing connection was reliable, MSC was looking ahead.
We've decided to improve services and have put on additional 1 000 TEU vessels to give us a weekly sailing from Fremantle.
Recent Port of Durban statistics published in FTW (February 16, 2001) indicated that almost 38% of total containerised exports and more than 51% of imports had a Far East address on the shipping documents, yet this is the one service where MSC does not offer direct sailings.
We have an established and reliable service to Jakarta, Singapore and Hong Kong via Fremantle, and by going to a weekly schedule we now offer better transit times. said Sarno.
This is a service that MSC intends growing and by 2002 you can expect further developments.
Pressed on this issue Captain Sarno said that when the new 6500TEU super container ships come into MSC's Mother Service between Europe and the Far East from 2002, the current range of large 4000TEU vessels will be released for other duties. He expected to have some of these available to commence a direct South Africa - Singapore schedule.
To achieve this we need to create a base for the future and one of the first steps is to improve the current SA - Australia - Far East connection.
Capt Sarno said one of the options being looked at was to feed containerised cargo from Durban to a port such as Salalah in Oman, where it could connect with the mother service. However the feeling was that those ships would probably be running close to fully loaded and that it would be best to commence a direct Durban - Singapore service.
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