South Korean carrier Hyundai Merchant Marine (HMM) has unveiled plans to order 22,000-TEU container ships.
HMM president and CEO C.K. Yoo bared during the company’s recent “2018 Sales Strategy Meeting” plans to order 22,000-TEU container ships in 2018.
Yoo said at the meeting: “This will be the mega-ship building project in accordance with the national expectation for being a leading shipping nation.” He did not elaborate.
Aside from this, the meeting held December 18 to 19 discussed preparations for the company’s sales strategies for the next year, said HMM in a release. Some 150 people were in attendance, including 50 HMM expatriates in the U.S., EU, and other parts of Asia, to discuss each unit’s sales strategy and a detailed promotion plan for 2018.
Yoo acknowledged that in the past year, “HMM has faced many changes such as regaining customer trust, recovering profitability, and ranking #1 in service reliability etc.”
Discussions focused on finding ways to strengthen manpower through professional education, and achieve innovative growth through blockchain technology.
Another important topic deliberated was securing profitability based on the overseas terminal belt (US West Coast–Pusan–Kaohsiung–Algeciras–Rotterdam).
Also touched on was “taking a preemptive action of countermeasures to market condition including deploying new vessels, opening new services, expanding business network, or reducing operation costs.”
Order for 20 vessels
Meanwhile, local media outlets are reporting that HMM is going to order, with support from the Korea Maritime Corporation that will be established by the government to support the country’s shipping industry, a total of 20 ships.
The order will reportedly consist of nine over 20,000-TEU ultra-large container vessels (ULCVs) and 11 vessels with capacities of over 13,000 TEUs. If this transpires, HMM will jump up the rankings to become the world’s seventh or eighth largest shipping firm.
The fleet expansion is said to be part of the survival efforts of HMM after the country’s top ocean carrier, Hanjin Shipping, went bankrupt in 2016, and in view of the ending in early 2020 of HMM’s strategic partnership with the 2M alliance.
Since it will take two years for HMM to receive the ULCVs it will order, the company intends to place the order by early next year.
Photo courtesy of HMM
