P&O Nedlloyd confirms Centreport, Lyttelton miss out

By NZPA

Tuesday 1st October 2002

P&O Nedlloyd Services today confirmed that its revamped "eastabout" service to New Zealand would call at Ports of Auckland, Port of Napier and Port Chalmers in Dunedin.

Port of Tauranga, New Zealand's biggest export hub, which had also put in a proposal for the "eastabout" route, also lost out but had less to lose than other ports as it did not have the previous Nedlloyd services.

The revamping of shipping services and replacement of older ships connecting New Zealand to markets in the UK, Northern Europe and Mediterranean as well as East Coast North America had been expected for more than a year, Nedlloyd said in a statement.

It said the weekly sailings on a fixed day would import the service for both exporters and importers.

Two service loops are to be provided by an alliance of partner shipping lines. The eastabout service will transit via Auckland, Napier, Port Chalmers, Panama Canal, East Coast North America, Europe, Suez Canal, and return via Australia.

This will be maintained by 10 ships with a 4100 container capacity -- the largest container ships to visit New Zealand.

The "westabouts" will transit via Auckland, Australia, Singapore, Suez Canal, Mediterranean, North Europe, East Coast North America, Panama Canal, New Zealand and Australia.

This would be maintained by 12 ships in the 2200 container range.

P&O Nedlloyd managing director in New Zealand Tony Gibson, whose company is the largest supplier of ships to the two service strings, said the service on a fixed day of the week would give exporters greater certainty and transit would be faster.

Mr Gibson said the refrigerated exporter particularly stood to benefit from the upgraded services.

The ships on the eastabout service have 1300 plugs for refrigerated containers and are the largest refrigerated container ships in the world. Upgrading the containers had cost $220 million.

Mr Gibson said the concentration of ship calls into three ports, Auckland, Napier and Port Chalmers "reflected the need to reduce the number of port calls, so that the global round voyage could hold its schedule integrity".

The rejigged service starting in December means that Port of Lyttelton and Wellington's Centreport will miss out on calls by the important shipping line.

He said the big container ships needed a rapid turnaround and although he did not say it, one of the reasons Lyttelton missed out was because of its failure to agree with unions to round-the-clock manning.

"Auckland, Napier and Port Chalmers will allow us to serve areas with high import volumes, as well as giving optimal service to areas of increasing export cargo volumes," Mr Gibson said, adding that "this choice was no reflection on the ports of Tauranga, Wellington and Lyttelton".

He said Nedlloyd would continue its relationship with Tauranga, Wellington and Lyttelton through other services.

"The fact is there was a commercial necessity whereby three ports had to miss out. A complex process of evaluation was undertaken in which we looked at each port's ability to handle our operational expectations for such things as berthing ships, work productivity, cargo storage and marshalling, power plugs for reefer containers etc, and also on the cargo flows in and out of each region."

The company said it had evaluated the feeder options at all ports for moving imports into, and exports out of, all areas of the country.

"The choice of Auckland, Napier and Port Chalmers is, in our opinion, the optimal choice to meet that matrix of requirements."

Detailed announcements about feeder arrangements to other parts of the country would be released by Nedlloyd shortly.

New shipping procedures introduced by Nedlloyd meant that it would take responsibility for the entire movement of a container through all stages to destination.

Ports of Auckland shares were steady in a weak market today at $6.20. Port of Tauranga shares were untraded after closing yesterday at $8.40 while Lyttelton Port, which had already lost ground heavily leading up to the announcement, sank another 11 cents to a two-year low of $1.45. It has slumped 26 cents in the last two weeks.

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