Seatrade Maritime: Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd alliance set for return to Suez Canal

The Gemini Cooperation of Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd is expected to make its return to Red Sea and Suez Canal routings with a service connecting Indian sub-continent and Middle East ports with the Mediterranean.

Neither company has denied plans to return the Gemini first service to the Suez Canal route following last week’s announcement by Maersk that its MECL service will re-route to Suez.

Seatrade Maritime News understands that the Gemini Cooperation will see its ME11 service return to the Suez Canal in the near future.

Similar to Maersk’s MECL service to the US East Coast, the ME11 calls at Jebel and Salalah, in the Middle East and Mundra and Jawaharlal Nehru ports on India’s west coast before heading around the Cape of Good Hope to Tangier, Valencia and Port Said in the Mediterranean. Gemini operates 12 vessels of an average 16,000 teu on the ME11.

Services connecting Middle East and India to the Med have some of the longest diversions via the Cape of Good Hope versus the total voyage length when compared to routing via the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, and analysts had expected these to be some of the first services to make the switch back to the Red Sea.

A resumption of Red Sea and Suez transits for this service would allow Gemini to call at Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea port of Jeddah which is currently served by three shuttle services, JD1, JD2 and JD3, which between them call at Tangier, Algeciras, Port Said Aqaba and Jeddah.

Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd responded separately with the same statement to Seatrade Maritime News, saying, “Within the framework of the collaboration, it is natural that Hapag-Lloyd and Maersk have ongoing discussions about when it is considered safe to introduce a trans-Suez network. Any changes to the network will be implemented in a way that seeks to minimise disruption for our customers, while upholding the Gemini Cooperation’s trademark of industry leading schedule reliability.”

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