Congratulations to one of our carrier partners Evergreen Shipping, who on Monday announced a major ship purchase of ten ships with a size of 13,800 TEUs each. They have purchased them through a leasing agreement with Korea Infrastructure Investments Asset Management Co., Ltd., or KIAMCO.
Evergreen will take delivery of the vessels beginning in the fourth quarter of 2013 and they are believed to be deployed on joint services on the Asia – Europe – Med trade. Evergreen will concurrently return expiring chartered vessels as new ones are delivered. Evergreen is one of the few global carriers who has resisted the trend of slot chartering with other vessel operators on services. They did it on the Transpacific several years ago with China Shipping, but otherwise have operated independently. Evergreen for a while operated their own “private” shared service with their acquisitions of Hatsu Marine and Lloyd Triestino until all were rolled under the Evergreen brand.
With this order, Evergreen now has the second largest order book (445,000 TEUs) behind industry leader Maersk.
