APL to start new service from India

Our Corporate Bureau

Mumbai, April 16: CONTAINER liner APL (American President Lines) is to launch a new liner service from India to the Far East and Middle East. The service, with a capacity of 4,900 TEUs (Twenty Equivalent Units), would be a fixed day, weekly service and the first vessel would call at NSICT on Wednesday. The ports of call for the liner service would be Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan in the Far East and Fujeirah in the Middle East. The launch of the liner service comes close on the heels of Indian maritime major Shipping Corporation of India (SCI) announcing plans to extend its liner service currently restricted up to Singapore to Far East.

SCI’s container liner service to Far East is expected to commence in over a month’s time with a capacity of 1,500 TEUs. The current capacity of the feeder service to Singapore has a capacity of 750 TEUs.

SCI officials said that the route holds good potential given that there is hardly any service on the route to South East Asia, coupled with an increase in India’s exports to Far East and America. Besides imports from China are are also expected to go up. The launching of liner service by APL followed by SCI is likely to see tariff cuts which will benefit exporters & importers, officials said.

SCI, which commenced its container liner operations in 1994, would further extend the Far East service to the west coast of America which will be its logical extension. This is currently the missing link, officials added.

APL, a member of the NOL group and one of the five leading transportation and logistics service providers globally, provides worldwide container transportation and logistics services through its fleet of more than 80 container ships.

In India, APL’s operated vessels call at nine major ports on the Indian coastline, each fed by an intricate network that serves 15 inland container depots (ICDs) and two more within Nepal borders.