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Gemini signals full Suez return by Q1 as it launches new Asia-Med service

Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd have revealed a further redesign to the Gemini Cooperation's Asia-Mediterranean network which will see a reorganisation of the regional hub-and-spoke model. Slated for introduction over the course of the second half of November, the move comes as the two carriers eye a full resumption of Suez transits by early next year, according to Hapag-Lloyd chief executive Rolf Habben Jansen. "We have announced a fair number of services that already have returned, and some more are returning in the weeks to come," he said in a press beefing last week. "As we have said all along, if we go back, we will do it step by step and in a managed way. I'm really happy that's what we've done, because we can also manage the load on the hubs and on the ports in Europe and the Mediterranean. "So far, that has not caused too many problems, it's been going well - if there is no change, I would expect that more or less all of our services will be back through Suez, maybe with one or two exceptions, somewhere in the course of Q1 next year," he added. The chief development in the revamped network is that Gemini will launch a new "transhipment hub-only" service between China and the west Mediterranean via the Suez Canal, dubbed AE18 by Maersk and SE5 by Hapag-Lloyd, featuring the following port rotation: Shanghai-Xiamen-Tanjung Pelepas-Algeciras-Tangier-Algeciras-Xiamen. The first vessel on the AE18/SE5 will be the 13,100 teu Maersk Edirne departure from Shanghai on 22 November. The vessel is currently completing her deployment on Maersk's standalone Asia-Mexico AC2 service. Maersk said the new service was designed to complement its other Asia-Europe strings as well as flows from Asia to West Africa and South America with its west Mediterranean hubs taking on more relay transhipment responsibilities. "These changes include the introduction of the new AE18 service, which, together with AE19, will consolidate our existing West Mediterranean hub coverage. "Through our modular network concept, this will also enable product enhancements for our customers, eg shipping from Asia to West Africa and to the East Coast of Latin America," it said in a customer advisory. As a result, Gemini's Asia-North Europe Loop 1 (Maersk AE2/Hapag NE1) will replace its current first European port of call of Tangier with Rotterdam, "providing an alternative and improved service from Ningbo and Shanghai to Rotterdam". The Asia-Mediterranean Loop2 (Maersk AE11/Hapag SE2) will also drop a call at westbound Tangier in favour of Port Said and introduce a pre-Suez call at Salalah. Meanwhile, the recently inaugurated Asia-Mediterranean Loop4 will insert an additional call at Damietta, close to Port Said and where Gemini appears to be developing a twin-hub strategy, as well as replacing Shanghai with Nansha. Further to which, the phased approach of returning Gemini services through Suez has been praised by liner analyst Lars Jensen, speaking at the same press briefing as Mr Habben Jansen. "For me, it has been a very positive surprise so far, that the changeover is happening as slowly as and gradually as it is actually doing," said Mr Jensen. "Before the normalization started, my key hypothesis was that this would happen a lot faster, and I'm positively surprised at the restraint we see from the carriers in terms of not making it a fast transition. "The latest numbers, at least I have, is we are roughly 30%-35% normalised across the market for the Suez routing - slightly more on the backhaul, slightly less on the head haul," he added.

Follow the money or follow the flag? Politics clouds port investment

In the seven years since TOC Americas last took place in Cartagena, global laden container volumes have slipped about 10% below where they would have been without the multiple disruptions that have hit the industry since 2018, according to Dinesh Sharma, director at Drewry Maritime Advisors. Sharma's research measured growth from 2018 against forecasts of where the industry had imagined it would be today last time they met in Cartagena. Predicting the future, he said, was and is not easy. Transshipment hubs grew by about 6% a year on average over that period, against roughly 3% for gateway ports and 1.5% for the underlying economies they serve. The inefficiency, he said, is no longer contained at the big transshipment hubs: it is flowing through to gateways too, leaving Latin America's overall throughput an estimated 2-3% below his 2018 projection. Performance varies sharply by market, Sharma added: Mexico and Brazil are growing more slowly, while Colombia is seeing strong consumer spending and rising real wages, with Peru, Chile and Ecuador following a similar pattern. Offering a geopolitical insight into the direction of travel, Henry Ziemer, of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, said the current political situation only further complicated the commercial picture. Ziemer argued the Americas are becoming strategically important precisely because the rest of the world has become more violently contested. "I think the Americas are becoming a key hedge, geopolitical hedge, in a more contentious world," he said. A tug of war over ownership That attention, Ziemer said, is not without cost. Washington's growing interest in the region's infrastructure raises the odds that port decisions get caught up in politics rather than commercial logic. "Who controls ports and maritime infrastructure matters now more than ever," he said, warning that US agencies do not always have full visibility of who actually owns or runs a given facility. "Ports can sometimes be caught in a bit of a tug of war where different agencies are acting under imperfect information about ownership structures, about operational control," he said. Who wins Panama's next tenders Ziemer's clearest example was Panama, which is running caretaker arrangements at Balboa and Cristóbal through APM Terminals and TiL while preparing to tender two new ports. "There's an expectation from the administration in the United States that a U.S. company will be basically receiving one of those ports," he said. He questioned whether that expectation matches the market: "Will they be the most competitive option? Will they adhere to the specifications that the Panamanian government is looking for?" For Ziemer, that is the sharper risk, not the cost of capital. "The real dilemma is not so much in the financing side, but in the question of which countries and which companies are delivering the infrastructure capability," he said. Reading the money, not the flags Other panelists read the same uncertainty in more commercial terms. Natalia Gil, economic investigations leader at Grupo Puerto de Cartagena (GPC), told the panel that capacity figures increasingly conceal differences in connectivity and reliability. Her team's analysis of routes across the Caribbean and Panama between 2023 and 2026 found that a container line changes a route, a service or a parameter of a service on average every 3.9 days, with the toughest quarters for Cartagena, including the Panama Canal drought and disruption around the Strait of Hormuz and the Suez Canal, also the quarters when the port won the most new services. Nicolas Romero, regional head Latin America at Pacific International Lines (PIL), said the line is redesigning its ships around the region's constraints rather than waiting for ports to catch up: "we take the challenge to adapt the fleet to the needs of the terminal." Enrique Piqueras, chief executive of PSA Panama, argued the bigger bottleneck in most Latin American countries sits outside the terminal gate altogether, a problem he said he had seen repeat in Peru, Colombia, Argentina and Panama. "Competitiveness isn't given by the port ... it's given by the environment," he said. Asked by an audience member from the Panama Canal Authority how to read where geopolitics is heading, Ziemer pointed away from announcements and towards capital flows, and towards countries with existing ties to Washington such as Panama, Colombia and Mexico. Sharma agreed the political backdrop was real, whoever occupies the White House. "As much as you like the current administration or dislike the current administration, what this has resulted is in a great big shakeup," he said, pointing to a shift from integrated tariff structures towards shorter-lived bilateral trade frameworks that add short-haul volume to ports without necessarily adding profit. But asked where capital was actually landing, he pointed to his own data rather than Washington's intentions: "If we just look at the expansions happening within Latin America, the vast majority of them are brownfield expansions." The gap between the two readings showed again when Sharma was pressed on how he weighs geopolitics against his own projections. "We just take what Henry says and we convert them into numbers," he said.

EXCLUSIVE: K+N appoints new US leader - more top changes coming

All eyes on third-quarter updates in freight forwarding from DSV and Kuehne + Nagel over the next 48 hours, it's also the right time to disclose leadership changes, based on the Premium feedback we received. Under the spotlight is the Swiss forwarder, which has massively outperformed its Danish rival on the stock market year to date. (And that's exactly why the laggard may offer a lot more upside to shareholders going forward, but I digress.) "Internal changes are happening fast, expect more in ...