ECONOMY

Taiwan’s Yang Ming picks PCT

Another international container shipping company, Taiwan’s Yang Ming Lines, is about to expand its use of the installations of Piraeus Container Terminal (PCT), the local subsidiary of China’s Cosco Pacific. Yang Ming follows the example of MSC, Maersk and Cosco itself, while other firms, such as France’s CMA CGM, occasionally use Piraeus too.

According to the agreement between PCT and Arkas Hellas, which operates as Yang Ming’s representative in Greece while also offering agency services, the Taiwanese company will multiply its arrivals to Piraeus as of Monday, May 4: From once a week, its vessels will be docking at the country’s main port four times per week.

Paris Evangelinos, the head of Arkas Hellas, told Kathimerini that Yang Ming is transferring to Piraeus the part of its loading activity that hitherto took place in Egypt. This practically constitutes a totally new activity for Piraeus, as it will welcome the company’s biggest vessels, which have a capacity of 15,000 containers.

“The most important thing is that Piraeus will now become the loading port for the company, which entails additional benefits for the port as the containers to be unloaded in Piraeus will then be received by other, smaller vessels that will take them to their final destination,” explained Evangelinos.

So far, only Cosco and MSC have been using the port’s installations for this kind of activity at Piraeus, as it is one of just a handful of ports in the Mediterranean that can serve such large ships. In the first quarter of the year, terminals 2 and 3, which PCT operates, handled 736,400 containers, up 7.5 percent from the same period in 2014.

Yang Ming is the world’s 14th biggest company in the container sector, with a fleet of 89 vessels and a total capacity of 410,000 containers.

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