The 21,413 TEU OOCL Hong Kong has made its first call at the Eurogate container terminal in Wilhelmshaven.

The 400-metre-long vessel is operating the Ocean Alliance’s Asia Europe Service Loop 1 service. Having called at Rotterdam and Gdansk before Wilhelmshaven, the next port of call is Felixstowe.

“We are proud to be able to welcome the world’s largest container ship to Eurogate Container Terminal Wilhelmshaven,” said Michael Blach, chairman of the Eurogate Group management board. “In Wilhelmshaven, we have optimum conditions for handling the new container behemoths with a transport capacity of up to 22,000 containers quickly and efficiently. Today’s port call of the Ocean Alliance is not the consortium’s first, but certainly the most impressive. We hope there will be many more and expect them to generate new impulses for the container port in Wilhelmshaven. We are already, after just one month, seeing positive developments for hinterland transports and additional services. For example, in the month of May alone, the number of rail containers at 2,083 units was more than double (+128%) that of this time last year. We hope this trend continues.”

The LL1 service directly connects Wilhelmshaven with the ports of Shanghai, Ningbo, Xiamen, Yantian and Singapore. Transit time from Wilhelmshaven to Singapore on the LL1 service is 27 days.

“It is a special honour for us to greet the world’s largest container ship here in Northern Europe,” said Jan Schmahl, managing director of the North Europe group at OOCL. “Our series of new builds with six modern, efficient ships with a capacity of 21,413 TEUs is a milestone for OOCL. The Wilhelmshaven location offers us optimum conditions for our new ships. Demand from our customers to ship their consignments via Wilhelmshaven on our LL1 service is constantly growing. Besides the high export demand, we are especially pleased to see a significant increase in the number of customers wishing to use Wilhelmshaven for import shipments. With the already realized as well as future improvements to the hinterland connections, we still see a high shipping potential that can be tapped into in Wilhelmshaven. All this means we can look ahead to the future with confidence.”

The next ship in the series is the 21,413 TEU OOCL Germany, which is expected to arrive at Wilhelmshaven in October 2017, according to Eurogate.