West Africa added to southbound schedule CONTAINER VOLUMES both south- and north-bound have exceeded expectations on the SA-US run during the first three months of the financial year beginning July.
That's the word from Mike Veary, chief executive at SafBank, where target marketing has in particular paid dividends on the northbound run.
We've had a strategy of penetrating the northbound market as much as we can, and to that end we put another ship into PE. At first this was fortnightly and we've now increased that to weekly, Veary told FTW in Cape Town last week. SafBank operates the weekly container service in association with Mediterranean Shipping Company; SafBank operating four and MSC three of the 7-vessel fleet.
Southbound there was a big surge of reefer cargo from the US before duties on poultry were increased substantially, according to Veary.
On the whole it's symptomatic of the growth in the trade that's occurred in the last two to three years.
Obviously the recent flurry on the financial markets and the impact on the rand is bound to affect imports. And with Far Eastern currencies softening, that has to be a more attractive market for our importers in the future.
We're ahead of budget at the moment, which is a nice place to be, but we expect it to get tougher as the year goes on both in terms of the big picture and the competition. In contrast to the container growth, Veary reports a softening in southbound volumes on the multi-purpose service, operated in conjunction with Lykes Lines, which caters for a highly specialised sector of the market.
While this service continues to conform to the tried and tested formula in terms of port rotation and vessel configuration, the multi-purpose service has added West Africa southbound on an ad hoc basis calling at Abidjan and one other port.
We'd like to send the ships in there every time because the deviation is within the capability of the schedule, and we're able to call there competitively because we're calling en route to South Africa, but no decisions have been made, says Veary.
A seamless change in the fleet for customers was the introduction earlier this month of a larger vessel to replace the Infanta. Also named the Infanta, she increases teu capacity from 930 to 1250, and is faster than her predecessor.
The speed helps if there's congestion in South Africa so that we can catch up northbound and maintain our schedule.
One has to build the speed into one's schedule these days because delays in South Africa have become endemic.
