The Dragon is back. You wanted a clear sign of MSC’s new positioning on the international shipping scene following the announcement of its divorce from Maersk? Here it is.
The Aponte Group company has just announced that it has reintroduced a new service between Asia and the Mediterranean; a service that had previously been set up in joint venture with Maersk under the 2M alliance and suspended in spring 2020 due to the pandemic crisis.
It is the old ‘AE20’ (as Maersk called it), now relaunched by MSC under the name ‘Dragon Service’. The service has been slightly modified compared to the past. Direct calls at the port of Naples to cover the southern Italian market and the Israeli port Ashdod Hadarom have been introduced.
The rotation will be as follows: Shanghai – Ningbo – Yantian – Singapore – Ashdod (HCT) – Naples – La Spezia – Genoa – Fos sur Mer – Gioia Tauro – King Abdullah – Singapore – Shanghai.
Vespucci Maritime CEO Lars Jensen said it was not the first time that MSC and Maersk had promoted connecting services in the transpacific trade which were not part of the 2M alliance.
According to Mr. Jensen with the launch of the Dragon Service, the Italo-Swiss carrier now expresses a clear intention to bring new tonnage into the trade between Asia and Europe, expanding the range of the network of ports it calls at and improving its capacity to penetrate specific markets.
He notes that there is no information to suggest that Maersk wants to do the same.
In short, the fact that the two carriers have now gone their separate ways is indisputable and MSC setting up this new service is the first proof of it.
Translation by Giles Foster
