Agencies
Monday, February 22, 2010

On 12 February 2010, the container ship MAERSK SYDNEY called at the Port of Hamburg for the first time as part of the Maersk Line’s expanded AE-10 scheduled liner service.

This liner service links the ports of Shenzhen (Dachan Bay), Ningbo, Shanghai, Kaohsiung, Shenzhen (Yantian), Hong Kong and Tanjung Pelepas with continental Europe.

A recent addition is the inclusion of Hamburg as a port of call for the AE-10 service.

The service also calls the Baltic Sea ports of Arhus, Gothenburg and Gdansk. Europe’s most important seaport for cargo from and to the Far East and China is already included in the rotation of the AE-1 service. The AE-10 and AE-1 services, as well as the third Maersk Far East service AE-2 are cleared at the Eurogate Container Terminal Hamburg (CTH). “The new AE-10 scheduled liner service cuts the transit time of services operated by the Maersk shipping company from 28 to 25 days in the case of Hong Kong, and offers additional direct connections from China and Malaysia.“

On the occasion of the first call of the AE-10 service in Hamburg, Bengt van Beuningen and Axel Mattern (from Port of Hamburg Marketing) presented the captain of the MAERSK SYDNEY, Peter French, with the Admiralty coat-of-arms of the Port of Hamburg.

The MAERSK SYDNEY was built at the IHI shipyard in Kure (Japan). This vessel is 335.5 metres long, 42.8 metres wide and has a maximum draught of 14 metres. It is one of a current fleet of 20 containerships with an average carrying capacity of 8,500 TEU operating in the combined AE-10 and AE-1 container liner services between northern Europe and eastern Asia. The vessels in the AE-10 and AE-1 services change rotation after each roundtrip.