MAERSK Line is moving two 2M alliance service calls to Liverpool for 12 weeks as continuing problems at Felixstowe provide a boost to Peel Ports’ operation in the northwest of the UK. The first vessels diverting to Liverpool will be the 2006-built, 7,943 teu ARCHIMIDIS on the TA2 service and 2004-built, 2,556 teu CAP BEATRICE on the COEX service to Liverpool on July 22 and July 20 respectively. “Unfortunately, Felixstowe terminal is suffering from slow operations caused by IT system issues,” Maersk said in a statement. “In order to protect our service integrity, we will be moving our 2M TA2 and COEX services from Felixstowe to Liverpool for a duration of 12 weeks.” Felixstowe has been suffering from congestion following the implementation of a new terminal operating system last month. As Lloyd’s List reported yesterday, Felixstowe is continuing to struggle with performance issues, particularly with loading export containers.

As of mid-September, CLdN will further expand its offering to the Iberian peninsula with a twice weekly Zeebrugge-Santander ro-ro service.

In January-June 2018, port Hong Kong (China) handled 277.7 million tonnes of cargo (-0.6%, year-on-year). According to the port authority, container throughput of the port grew by 4.6% to 20.5 million TEUs. In 2017, the port of Shanghai handled 560.87 million tonnes, its container throughput totaled 40.23millionTEUs.