China’s Cosco Group is planning to offer a Straits-Indonesia-Thailand loop in the new ITX Indonesia-Thailand Express in partnership with Singapore’s Samudera.
The new ITX service unites Samudera’s two existing services, the JKT and the BKX-2, and will have a two-week round trip deploying the 1,756-TEU Nordlion from Cosco and the 1,708-TEU Sinar Subang from Samudera.
The loop has a port rotation of Singapore, Bangkok, Laem Chabang, Singapore, Jakarta and back to Singapore.
Meanwhile, Taiwan’s Yang Ming Marine has added a further China-Southeast Asia-Western India connection to merge an existing West India North Asia service (WIN) service it jointly runs with Nippon Yusen Kaisha, Hanjin Shipping, Evergreen Line, and X-Press Feeders.
The service, retaining the brand name WIN, will deploy six vessels of 3,600 to 4,500 TEUs in capacity. One vessel, the 3,725-TEU Ym North, will come from Yang Ming.
The service will rotate through Ningbo, Shanghai, Shenzhen-Shekou, Singapore, Port Klang, Mumbai-Nhava Sheva, Pipavav, Colombo, Port Klang, Singapore, Hong Kong, and back to Ningbo.
Hanjin will name the loop ICS, while Evergreen will call it CIX 3, and X-Press Feeders will brand it as CNX 2.
In other news, SITC International Holdings, a shipping and logistics company in Hong Kong specializing in intra-Asia operations, officially opened its Indonesia office early this month.
For the past two years, SITC’s shipping group has been running the CKV lane connecting Indonesia with nine other Asian countries and regions—China, Japan, South Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Cambodia, the Philippines, and Taiwan.
The route has an annual import and export volume of 40,000 TEUs. SITC Indonesia said it expects business to continue to develop as intra-Asia trade deepens.
The SITC Shipping Group currently operates 61 vessels, of which it owns 32. It operates 47 service routes covering the 10 countries and regions, and calls at 45 ports. Overall container volumes in 2013 exceeded 1.98 million TEUs.
Photo: Choo Yut Shing
