18 March 2024 (Lloyd's List) - HAPAG-LLOYD chief executive Rolf Habben Jansen has dismissed concerns that some destinations will see fewer vessel calls under the new Gemini Cooperation agreement that it is forming with Maersk.

Shippers have raised concerns that several key ports and even countries will no longer receive direct calls under Gemini’s hub-and-spoke network design, which aims to reduce the number of main line port calls in favour of feeder operations.

France, for example, has no direct calls on the Asia-Europe services offered in the network, but Habben Jansen said this would not affect shipments to and from France.

“French ports are not absent from the deepsea network,” he said in a presentation to customers. “We will have weekly shuttles to Le Havre and Marseille Fos.”

French ports would be among the winners of the Gemini Cooperation, he added.

“Today we see that in all alliances, whenever choices need to be made to omit ports, then France is typically the one that gets omitted. Under Gemini, there will be weekly services at very competitive transit times.”

Hapag-Lloyd’s home port of Hamburg is also set to see fewer calls under the new network, but again Habben Jansen said the impact would be minimal.

“We will still have many departures and arrivals in Hamburg,” he said.

“I think the amount of cargo that we will move through Hamburg may go down a little bit but it will not change dramatically.

“In Germany, our customers will also have the option to load in Bremerhaven or in Wilhelmshaven so they will have more options, which may result in a shift in cargo from Hamburg, but I don’t expect that to be more than 10%-15%.”

At Wilhelmshaven, where Hapag-Lloyd has a 30% stake in Eurogate’s Container Terminal Wilhelmshaven at JadeWeserPort, volumes were likely to rise in response to greater levels of transhipment, he added.

“We are very confident this model will work,” Habben Jansen said.

“Not everything will be transhipped but it is a movement towards more transhipment. Compared to what we see today, there is about 10%-15% more cargo that will be transhipped.”

He said that the two operators would make transhipment “much more robust”, but transhipment has always been a weak link in the supply chain for shippers.

“I can understand the concerns — we had those ourselves in the beginning — but I hope those concerns will have gone in a year or two from now,” he said.

Meanwhile, Habben Jansen said Hapag-Lloyd would continue to build up its own terminals.

“We continue to invest in the terminal side of our business,” he said.

“We had three terminal investments in 2023, which gave us access to 17 more terminals in Europe, the US and Latin America.

The company has set up a separate terminal operations unit in Rotterdam and now runs it as a second business segment.

“I think we will gradually continue to grow that over the next three to five years,” Habben Jansen said.