Evergreen revises its China - Australia links

Evergreen and Cosco are to terminate their slot charter agreement in the China - Australia trade in February 2002. In future, Evergreen will serve this trade by transhipment over Singapore using its slot allocation on Lloyd Triestino's CEM service between China and Singapore and on the ASA service which is operated jointly by Lloyd Triestino di Navigazione SpA, Regional Container Lines and Hanjin Shipping Co.

The first southbound CEM sailing from China will be LT Unity on 15 February, 2002 from Shanghai and the first northbound ASA sailing will be Fei Yun He on 5 March, 2002 from Brisbane.

The weekly CEM service links China with Europe using eight 25-knot post-panamax ships, each with a capacity of 5652TEU. It makes direct calls at Shanghai, Ningbo, Yantian and Hong Kong. Transit times from China to Singapore range from seven days (ex Shanghai) to three days (ex Hong Kong).

The ASA consortium, of which Lloyd Triestino (LT) is a founding member, operates four ships on this weekly service round-tripping in 28 days with the following port rotation:

Singapore - Brisbane - Sydney - Melbourne - Singapore.

At the recent Australian 2001 Shipping & Transport Awards Dinner in Sydney, the ASA consortium was the winner of the Southeast Asia award for schedule reliability.