by Lloyd's List

1 April 2025(Lloyd's List) - THE ability to control capacity and terminal operations will give the new Gemini Cooperation the tools to reach its ambitious 90% reliability target, APM Terminals head of hubs Lars Mikael Jensen said.

The alliance between Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd, which began at the end of January 2025, uses a hub-and-spoke model, sees port calls slashed and instead central “hubs” used as transhipment centres. Feeder or shuttle services will deliver containers to spoke ports that might ordinarily be part of a traditional east-west loop.

Data from Sea Intelligence shows the Gemini alliance recorded 94% schedule reliability in February 2025, though those vessels have not completed their first loop yet.

While the early data will certainly be welcomed in Copenhagen and Hamburg, Jensen stressed the real work begins now, as the bigger vessels begin arriving in Europe and the US east coast.

Jensen said he and his team “follow every call” and said the March data was “also looking good”, but that it was still too early to declare the Gemini gamble a success.

“All I’m saying is judge us fully when we get to the end of the second quarter, but there is no doubt we have got a lot of the design principles confirmed.”

Key to delivering this reliability is the flexibility that comes with owning the infrastructure, Jensen said.

Because APMT controls operations at eight Gemini hubs, it can essentially throw resources at delays to gain time back, Jensen explained.

Using the example of Gudrun Maersk (IMO: 9302877), which arrived late to Rotterdam’s Maaskvlakte II from Tanjung Pelepas due to an engine problem, Jensen said the terminal team would be able to dedicate all of Maaskvlakte II’s cranes to the vessel in a bid to recover some of that lost time and put it back on schedule.

“Rather than being a sort of problem catalyst, where you come to the hub and get even more delayed, we can actually be a shock absorber,” he said.

Fewer port calls for the mainline services also means less chance of being delayed initially, where often an issue at one port in a loop can cascade down the entire voyage.

Being the masters of their own destiny means the two Gemini carriers would better cope with the current turbulence being created in global trade, Jensen said.

If volumes out of China were to drop drastically, he said, and increase out of Vietnam or Indonesia, then the alliance would be able to take vessels that were shuttling to and from Chinese ports and redeploy them in Southeast Asia.

“I will, to the end of my days, keep arguing that it gives you a flexibility that a 16-stop round voyage would not have.”

The same applies to any potential port fees for China-built vessels levied under the US Trade Representative proposal.

While Jensen stressed the futility of speculation in light of seemingly daily policy announcements from Washington, he admitted that at its most extreme the USTR plan would “obviously have a big impact” for Maersk and the end consumer.

But by removing US east coast port calls and using Cartagena as a transhipment port, for example, hefty fees from calling at the likes of Mobile, Miami and Jacksonville with large vessels could be avoided, Jensen said.

In the end, reliability will either be the stick Gemini is beaten with or the metric with which it is praised.

“What the end customers have been telling us all the time is that if you can be there, when you say you will be there, then the fact that it consistently takes a couple of days longer is not an issue,” Jensen said.

But that reliability does not necessarily have to come at the cost of competitiveness, Maersk believes.

The traditional thinking in the container sector is that more transhipment means greater cost. But better utilisation of vessels means cost savings will “come out of the woodwork”, Jensen said.

A vessel sailing between what Jensen called the “shoulders” of a loop, i.e. Rotterdam to Aarhus or Gothenburg (which welcomed its first Gemini shuttle service this week) would typically have just half of its sometimes 20,000 teu capacity used.

By ensuring its biggest vessels are fuller, Jensen thinks the alliance can save on fuel and, perhaps in the long term, any cost associated with emissions.

Gemini is still far too new for any meaningful conclusions to be drawn about its success, and customers of both Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd will be watching and waiting to see if the alliance can deliver on its ambitious reliability promise.

Jensen said generally customers were receptive of the idea, but needed proof that it would work in practice.

“This is all our theory,” Jensen added. “We know that we need to prove this, because we are very much going against traditional ways of operating ocean networks”.

If Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd can prove their working, then there may be plenty of other carrier watching on thinking of how they might be able to run a version of Gemini on their own networks.

But as Jensen explained, it’s not as simple as just copying your neighbour’s homework.

“We get this question a lot internally: can it be replicated,” he said. The answer is that while replication is possible, it requires significant investment in and control over those hub ports at strategic locations on what Jensen calls the east-west highway.

Looking at the Gemini hubs on a map, you can join the dots and draw the major trade route between eastern China and Europe (if the Red Sea were an option for the network).

“I don't think one should underestimate what it takes,” he said, “we’ve been on this journey for quite a number of years.”

“I think you need the terminal capacity in the right locations. I’d argue that you need a large degree of control on those central terminals, and then you need to have the courage to trust the system.

“Now, that is not to say that nobody in five years’ time will have been able to match it. If somebody has somehow, we’d be very happy, because it just proves what we’ve been working on for the past five years is the right way forward.”