The “Damietta Express” was the first ship in the Gemini network’s new “Hamburg Express” class to moor at JadeWeserPort in Wilhelmshaven on April 2.
The deep-water port will be used by the two container shipping companies Hapag-Lloyd and Maersk as a hub for mainline services in future.
The operator Eurogate will unload a total of 7,000 containers there with the help of eight container gantry cranes, after which the Megamax container ship will set course for the NTB terminal in Bremerhaven for the first time. The “Damietta Express”, named after an Egyptian port city on the Nile Delta and only one year old, has a capacity of 23,644 TEU, is 400 m long and 61 m wide. Until now, the ships in this class have operated on the shipping company’s FE3 Far East service to the port of Waltershof in Hamburg.
Gemini transfers Far East services to the Jade
However, in connection with the new Gemini joint service, the sister ships of this class deployed in the NE1 service are already turning in Wihelmshaven and Bremerhaven. This is because the German deep-water port on the Jade, like Bremerhaven, is set as a “hub” in the Gemini network of Hapag-Lloyd and Maersk, i.e. as a port of call for the so-called main line services. Hamburg has to accept its role as a subordinate “spoke” port. The loading ports for the NE1 service in China are Ningbo, Shanghai and Tanjung Pelepas. The route currently runs via the Cape of Good Hope to Tangier, before calling at Wilhelmshaven, Bremerhaven and Rotterdam. It will then return to Ningbo via Salalah and Singapore. Thanks to the deep draught in the JadeWeserPort, Wilhelmshaven is the first German port that ships of this size can call at directly.
The new Gemini services with the “hub-and-spoke” concept mean that fewer ports are now being called at directly. The shipping companies are focusing more on “hubs”, from where the cargo is distributed further by feeder ships. With this approach, the partners Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd want to create a more efficient global container service that improves punctuality on the one hand and reduces disruptions on the other. As a result, Hapag-Lloyd and Maersk will only serve around 15 central ports worldwide with their large ships. This new hub-and-spoke strategy replaces the previous point-to-point system in container shipping and promises a high level of punctuality. In addition to the 29 intercontinental direct services, there are 28 “spokes”. These feeder connections bring the cargo from other ports to the hubs or distribute it from there to the respective region, also by the most direct route possible. 13 of these operate in Europe, ten in Asia, four in the Middle East and one in America.
Schedule reliability of 90%
With this new service, the two partners want to guarantee an unprecedented 90% schedule reliability in the industry, from summer at the latest. “Precisely because the shuttles are waiting in the hubs, the punctuality of the main services must be significantly higher than 90% in order to achieve our goal in the end,” Rolf Habben Jansen, CEO of Hapag-Lloyd, recently explained. As a Hapag-Lloyd spokeswoman has now explained, schedule punctuality in the first month of this service is currently as high as 94%, although it will take until the summer before all schedules are fully in place.
According to Habben Jansen, the share of transshipment cargo in the total transport volume has risen from 35% to around 45%. The JadeWeserPort in Wilhelmshaven is set to benefit massively as one of the hubs in the Gemini network, to the detriment of Hamburg. One reason for this is that the shuttle ships, with a capacity of around 6,000 TEU, are now significantly larger and can therefore pass through the Kiel Canal with more cargo. However, as the shipping companies also want to save the long and costly territorial voyage on the Elbe to Hamburg, more containers destined for the German hinterland are now being handled on the Jade and Weser. According to initial estimates, the Gemini service at JadeWeserPort is expected to handle between 1.3 and 1.5 million TEU this year, compared with 843,452 TEU last year.
Hapag-Lloyd itself has held a stake in the container terminal in Wilhelmshaven for three years. Bremerhaven is available as an alternative hub in the North Range, where Maersk operates the North Sea Terminal (NTB) in a joint venture with Eurogate at the northern end of Stromkaje. The hubs Tangier Med (Morocco) and Algeciras (Spain) complement each other in the western Mediterranean, Damietta and Port Said in the eastern Mediterranean, and Singapore and the Malaysian port of Tanjung Pelepas in Asia, for example.
340 ships in the Gemini network
The new Gemini network has a slot capacity of 3.4 million TEU and will be operated by up to 340 ships – 60% provided by Maersk and 40% by Hapag-Lloyd. However, the exact number of ships deployed will depend on the situation in the Red Sea.
The German-flagged “Damietta Express” was built at the Hanwha Ocean shipyard in Okpo, South Korea, and only entered service last year. All twelve ships in the “Hamburg Express” class are powered by dual-fuel technology. Ideally, the ships can be powered by green methane. This would eliminate 95 percent of greenhouse gases compared to conventional marine diesel. Ships can already run on LNG today. This reduces CO2 emissions by 15 and 25%, sulphur dioxide emissions by up to 95% and soot emissions by 95%. Other innovations in this class include an optimized hull, highly efficient propellers and a shore power connection. The “Hamburg Express” class is an essential part of Hapag Lloyd’s own efforts to achieve “net zero” fleet operations by 2045. (CE)
