Service to and from Hamburg Remains Available for MAERSK ME1 Customers

The Danish shipping line MAERSK will be making a seasonal adjustment to the rotation of its ME1 service as of February 2020. ME1 has been providing weekly connections from India via Dubai and Saudi Arabia to the German ports of Hamburg, Bremerhaven, and Wilhelmshaven. The service will temporarily suspend calls to Hamburg from February on. The ports of Bremerhaven and Wilhelmshaven, which have already been called at so far, remain on schedule.

MAERSK Line informed its customers that container cargo can be shipped to and from Hamburg with MAERSK’s AE7 service, which continues to call there. Axel Mattern, CEO of Port of Hamburg Marketing, said: “We presume that the AE7 connections to and from Hamburg will serve as an alternative to the ME1 service, so a large part of the container volume previously shipped with ME1 will still be handled in Hamburg after the schedule is changed. The AE7 service operates 12 large container vessels with capacities between 16,500 and 19,500 TEU, providing adequate capacity to handle that.”

MAERSK will still be running a total of five container liner services calling at the Port of Hamburg even after the ME1 service is suspended there.