A new majority stake acquisition of Roland Spedition GmbH, a full-service rail and road transport operator, allows HHLA to boost hinterland links to and from Austria. The Hamburg-based company took over 51 per cent of the Austria-based intermodal service provider and now eyes optimising combined transport operations within its network.
Shareholders and managing directors of Roland Spedition, Christian Gutjahr, and Nikolaus Hirnschall commented regarding the acquisition that the two parties have been well-known partners for 40 years already. They stressed that nothing will change in their company’s structure, employee teams, and operations.
According to HHLA, Roland Spedition carries yearly volumes nearing 130,000 TEUs and is one of the largest owner-led container operators for combined hinterland transport in Austria. The logistics giant aims to incorporate Roland Spedition’s network into its own and benefit from links to Bremerhaven, Rotterdam, Antwerp, or Koper and Trieste.
At the same time, it aims to pull some of the Austrian company’s resources and use them for business with HHLA-owned shipping terminals in Tallinn, Trieste, and Odessa, as well as hinterland intermodal terminals. It should be noted that apart from rail operations, Roland Spedition also owns a truck fleet, making this combination ideal for first—and last-mile operations in combined transport links.
Welcome a new company on Maxmodal. You can see PENAVICO SHENZHEN LOGISTICS services on their business profile, drop them a message, add them to your contacts or submit a special request to them
On the 17th of April, 2024, after a one-year suspension, thanks to the joint efforts of the international association “Trans-Caspian International Transport Route” (“TITR Association”) and “Xinjiang “COSCO Shipping Container Lines Co., Ltd”, the container transport of tomato paste resumed as part of a block train from Xinjiang, China to the port of Naples, Italy along the TITR route. The train ceremonially departed from Jinghe station at 11:30 local time.
The container train will pass through the Khorgos-Altynkol railway border crossing on the Kazakh-Chinese border and arrive at the port of Aktau, Kazakhstan on the Caspian Sea, where the containers will be loaded onto a feeder vessel owned by the Kazakh shipping company LLP “NMSC “Kazmortransflot” and delivered to the port of Baku (Alyat) in Azerbaijan. From there, the container block train will travel via the railways of Azerbaijan and Georgia to the port of Poti, Georgia. After arrival and processing at the port of Poti, the containers of tomato paste will be loaded onto the COSCO Shipping Container Lines vessel and then travel through the Black and Mediterranean Seas via the Greek port of Piraeus to the port of Naples in Italy.
The expected transit time for the train from Jinghe station to the port of Poti is 11 days, and a single transport document – the SMGS waybill – will be used along the entire length of the specified multimodal route.
It should be noted that the specialists of Kazakh Railways have developed a special schedule for the passage of container trains on the route Altynkol station – Aktau port, according to which the speed of container trains is about 1050 km/day, thanks to which trains cover this section of the route (3128 km) in 72 hours. Similar block train schedules are used on the railways of Azerbaijan and Georgia.
The service providers along the entire route of the block train from Altynkol station to the port of Poti are members of the International Trans-Caspian Transport Consortium (subsidiaries of full members of the TITR Association) – “KTZ Express”, “ADY Container”, “GR Logistics and Terminlas”.
Next week, another block train carrying tomato paste is scheduled to leave Urumqi for Italy on the TITR route. In addition, two container trains are planned for May and June this year, with the number and frequency of departures to be further increased.
Hello this is Sid from Eternity Solutions LLC. We are a logistic company based in New York.
We do provide trucking services all over the USA. We haul containers from and to the seaports and rail-ramps. If you guys have any requirements please let me know.
Hong Kong fell out of the world’s top 10 container ports last year, for the first time in the history of container shipping, according to new data from Alphaliner on the world’s busiest 30 box ports.
HK saw traffic last year drop 14.1%, to 14.3m teu, establishing the long-term decline of what was always a leading container port – 20 years ago it regularly vied with Singapore and Shanghai for the title of the world’s busiest – deposed from 2023’s tenth ranking by Dubai.
“Dubai overtook two of its nearest competitors in 2023 to make the top 10, a position it previously occupied in 2018. As earlier predicted by Alphaliner, it moved ahead of Hong Kong, which posted its seventh year of consecutive volume declines and has now lost a third of its container traffic over the past decade,” Alphaliner wrote today.
The only other major port to have suffered a greater fall in volumes than Hong Kong was New York & New Jersey, which saw its throughput decline 17.7%, to 7.8m teu, for the year.
“It was not alone in the US: Los Angeles, Long Beach and east coast port Savannah, a surprise feature in the top 30 during the pandemic, saw throughput drop year on year by 13%, 12% and 16%, respectively.
“Nonetheless, the pandemic has so far been net positive for Long Beach and New York/New Jersey, with volumes still up on 2019 numbers,” Alphaliner said.
Last year saw two new entrants to the top 30 – China’s Qinzhou grew 13.1%, to reach 6.1m teu, in position 26, while Vietnam’s Cai Mep was ranked 30th with a throughput of 5.6m teu, flat in terms of growth, but allowing it to overtake Savannah and Manila, which both posted declining volumes.
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The Xi’an Guojigang Railway Station in Xi’an, northwest China’s Shaanxi province, is the railway station that sees the most trips made by China-Europe freight trains across China. It is designed to handle 5.4 million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs) and transport 66 million tons of cargo via railway each year.
Since the China-Europe freight train (Xi’an) service was launched in 2013, Xi’an has handled over 20,000 China-Europe freight trains, or about a quarter of China’s total. It operated more than 5,000 China-Europe freight trains in 2023 alone.
Today, Xi’an Guojigang Railway Station operates 18 regular international westward routes that reach Almaty in Kazakhstan, Tashkent in Uzbekistan and Hamburg in Germany and cross the Caspian Sea, covering the entire Eurasian continent and connecting Xi’an to major international trade hubs.
The station also operates scheduled rail-sea intermodal services to Qingdao, Ningbo and Lianyungang in the east, and freight services to Vietnam and Laos in the south.
Currently, Xi’an Guojigang Railway Station serves as a distribution hub for freight from more than 20 provinces across China, as 21 rail routes to Western Europe pass through it.
“Although Xi’an isn’t on the border or the coast, you can see the whole world from here,” says Li Pei, a duty manager at the station.
According to Shao Bo’er, general manager of Xi’an International Inland Port Multimodal Transportation Co., Ltd., which operates the China-Europe freight train (Xi’an) service, the company’s business volume increased by 1.5 times year-on-year in the first two months of this year.
The company has gained major domestic enterprises like Sany Heavy Industry and LiuGong as new clients, as well as multinational corporations such as Volkswagen, Shao said. Even consigners from Japan and South Korea would take Xi’an as a transfer hub for their goods to Europe, Shao added.
In July 2023, the station upgraded its service to a “2.0 version” – with two outbound and one inbound full-time schedule trains per week.
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THE Alliance is to continue the suspension of its Asia-North America east coast EC4 service, reversing a decision to relaunch this month.
“THE Alliance members – Hapag-Lloyd, ONE, HMM, Yang Ming – will postpone the resumption of the Asia-US east coast via Suez EC4 service until the situation in the Red Sea stabilises further,” liner Alphaliner wrote today in its weekly report.
“The EC4 had been suspended in November due to poor market conditions, and its re-launch was originally planned for mid-April,” it added.
The liner shipping analyst explained that the vessels due to be deployed on the EC4 would be assigned to the alliance’s three remaining Asia-US east coast services – EC1, EC2 and EC5 – which would all be expanded to feature additional port calls.
The EC1, which transited the Suez Canal but now sails via the Cape of Good Hope, is to make an additional call at Xiamen on its head-haul ex-Asia leg. EC2, going via the Panama Canal, will also feature an additional Asia outbound call, at the southern Chinese hub of Yantian.
Meanwhile, the EC5 service, which connects South-east Asia with the US east coast and has no Chinese ports in its rotation, will add a call at Charleston and a second call at New York on its backhaul leg.
The continuing disruption, caused by Houthi attacks, is in danger of becoming a de facto blockade of the Suez Canal, and has also hit the scheduling plans of alliance member ONE, which is set to launch a standalone service between India and the US east coast.
Due to begin next month, the WIN service will postpone both head-haul and backhaul calls at the Egyptian transhipment hub of Damietta, the head-haul call at Algeciras and the backhaul call at Jeddah while its vessels have to transit the Cape of Good Hope.
French shipping giant CMA CGM and Italian rail freight operator GTS Rail are establishing a new joint venture (JV) called European Container Network to take their collaboration to an international level. The two companies are already cooperating in Italy, especially from the port of Genoa.
Container shipping is responsible for moving 90% of the world’s goods, according to the World Economic Forum. But, if shipping containers aren’t at the right place at the right time, the global supply chain may face serious problems. It could result in high inflation, shortages of key materials and products as well as revenue losses to large and small businesses alike. At the same time, over 95% of shipping container manufacturing is happening in the nation that leads the world in exports — China, according to the Federal Maritime Commission. Here’s how shipping containers can save, or cripple, the global economy.
