Maersk Line’s 3rd Hamburg, Far East Service
On 12 February 2010, the container ship Maersk Sydney called at the Port of Hamburg for the first time as part of the Maersk Line’s expanded AE-10 scheduled liner service. This liner service links the ports of Shenzhen (Dachan Bay), Ningbo, Shanghai, Kaohsiung, Shenzhen (Yantian), Hong Kong and Tanjung Pelepas with continental Europe.
A recent addition is the inclusion of Hamburg as a port of call for the AE-10 service. The service also calls the Baltic Sea ports of Arhus, Gothenburg and Gdansk. Europe’s most important seaport for cargo from and to the Far East and China is al-ready included in the rotation of the AE-1 service. The AE-10 and AE-1 services, as well as the third Maersk Far East service AE-2 are cleared at the Eurogate Container Terminal Hamburg (CTH).
On the occasion of the first call of the AE-10 service in Hamburg, Bengt van Beunin-gen and Axel Mattern (from Port of Hamburg Marketing) presented the captain of the Maersk Sydney, Peter French, with the Admiralty coat-of-arms of the Port of Hamburg.
Containerized traffic with Asia via Hamburg reached a total volume of 4.2 million containers (TEU) in 2009. With 2.3 million TEU, the People’s Republic of China (including Hong Kong) retained its top ranking among the ten most important trading partner in container traffic for the Port of Hamburg in 2009.
There are almost 160 departures a week from Hamburg to the North Sea and Baltic Sea regions. Accordingly, the port on the river Elbe has the most densely structured network of feeder services in northern Europe.
The Maersk Sydney was built at the IHI shipyard in Kure (Japan). This vessel is 1,100 ft long, 140 ft wide and has a maximum draft of 46 ft. It is one of a current fleet of 20 containerships with an average carrying capacity of 8,500 TEU operating in the combined AE-10 and AE-1 container liner services between northern Europe and eastern Asia. The vessels in the AE-10 and AE-1 services change rotation after each roundtrip.
