The Chinese feeder shipping company Diamond Line, Cosco’s transshipment division based in Germany, is expanding its liner services to the Mediterranean.
This involves a service between Northern Europe and the Mediterranean, which was already established in 2017 with standard Panamax ships. The “Xin Xia Men” is the first Panamax wide beam to be deployed, the largest ship on this route to date with a capacity of 5,668 TEU. [ds_preview]
The service is operated jointly by Cosco, OOCL and Yang Ming. The “Xin Xia Men” replaces the classic Cosco-Panamax “CSCL Brisbane (4,253 TEU), which is moving to the “MED3” service of the “Ocean Alliance”.
Diamond Line expands fleet capacity
Later this year, Diamond Line will deploy two more 5,700 TEU vessels. This will reportedly increase the capacity operated by Cosco in the “NFT 2” service by almost 40%.
The “NET2 / NEX” service between Northern Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean will in future be offered with four ships (3 x Cosco, 1 x OOCL) calling at Felixstowe, Hamburg, Rotterdam, Antwerp, Piraeus, Mersin, Iskenderun, Haifa, El Dekheila, Piraeus, Salerno and Felixstowe. This will remain a five-week rotation, they say.
The Diamond Line, feeder arm of the Chinese Cosco, offers 21 services calling at 25 countries and covering more than 65 ports. Last year, a direct service from Turkey and Spain to Morocco (TSM) was opened. “With the expansion of NET2’s transport capacity, the foundations have now been laid for increasing the fleet in the coming years in order to meet the growing demand for capacity from customers,” says HU Hua, Managing Director of Diamond Line GmbH in Hamburg.
