The United Kingdom Hydrographic Office (UKHO) has announced the signing of a collaboration agreement with the Japanese Hydrographic Association (JHA) that will enable them to provide Admiralty customers with over 600 new ENCs of Japanese waters and the Malacca Strait.
This agreement comes on the back of a number of other significant successes for the UKHO, who in addition to signing with Japan, have recently secured distribution arrangements with several other nations in the Far East. Together, these deals will provide extensive ENC coverage of Far Eastern waters and bring the UKHO a major step closer to providing its customers with a single source for all their official Electronic Navigational Chart (ENC) needs.
The detail that makes this growth particularly interesting for shipping companies is that Admiralty ECDIS Service customers pay a fixed subscription fee up front and are automatically supplied with new ENCs as they become available during their subscription period without extra charge. Therefore, early-adopting customers of the Admiralty ECDIS Service - particularly those trading in the Baltic and the Mediterranean where growth over the last 12 months has been most significant for UKHO - have already received massive benefits from this new UKHO service, and customers trading in the Far East will receive similar benefits in the months to come.
The new ENCs supplied by the JHA provide comprehensive coverage of Japanese waters at Overview, General, Coastal, Approach and Harbour scales including the key ports of Kobe, Nagoya and Tokyo. In addition, ENCs of the busy and important Malacca Strait - reported to carry approximately 60,000 vessels a year between the Indian Ocean and the
South China Sea - are provided via the same agreement.