The OCEAN Alliance of COSCO Shipping Lines, Evergreen Marine Corporation and CMA CGM has launched a new service connecting the northern Chinese port of Tianjin with Europe, in another sign of Tianjin’s growing volumes.
In a ceremony in Tianjin port on 9 April, port officials stated that it is also the first ocean-going route launched from Tianjin, which is part of the Belt and Road, this year.
[s2If is_user_logged_in()]Launching the service, which Evergreen is marketing as a China-Europe shuttle service, was the Evergreen-chartered 14,354TEU Theseus, which departed from Tianjin on 9 April.
The service loop is Tianjin, Qingdao, Ningbo, Shanghai, Yantian, Singapore, Colombo, Antwerp, Hamburg and Rotterdam. Besides Theseus, Evergreen will deploy nine other ships that each have capacity ranging between 14,000TEU and 20,000TEU.
OCEAN, the world’s largest container shipping alliance, said that the weekly service facilitates seaborne flows of imports and exports between northern Europe and the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region.
In 2020, Tianjin was the eighth busiest container port, having handled 18.36 million TEU, up 6% year-on-year. In Q1 2021, Tianjin’s container volumes grew 20% year-on-year to 4.47 million TEU.
On 26 February, COSCO Shipping Ports, the COSCO group’s terminal operating unit, became the largest shareholder of Tianjin’s container terminal, intending to develop the port into an integral part of the Belt and Road initiative
Since the beginning of this year, Tianjin Port Group has given full play to the Belt and Road initiative by helping to launch new shipping routes as well as sea-rail route via the Eurasian Land Bridge, through working with shipping alliances and liner operators.
Martina Li
Asia Correspondent
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