Evergreen Marine Corp (長榮海運) is withdrawing 31 aging ships from its fleet to cope with slumping demand, a company official said yesterday.
Asia’s largest container shipper also said it would raise rates on Asia-US routes next month, after an alliance of major container shipping lines reached a deal on Tuesday, an Evergreen’s public relations official said by telephone.
Evergreen is scheduled to dismantle one-sixth of its 180 ships through 2013, Eric Lin (林司忠) said, confirming reports carried by two local business dailies yesterday.
Under the plan, the company is to return some chartered ships to their owners when their leases expire and dismantle other ships more than 26 years old and sell them as scrap metal, Lin said.
Jack Yen (顏火燿), president of Evergreen Marine, said in a stock exchange filing later yesterday that the 31 container ships destined for dismantlement are 20 G-type ships and 11 GX-type ships.
The G-type ships, with a capacity of 2,728 TEUs (twenty-foot equivalent units), and GX-type ships, with a capacity of 3,428 TEUs, were built between 1983 and 1988, the Chinese-language Economic Daily News reported.
The move came as Evergreen chairman Chang Jung-fa (張榮發) said in a recent interview with Japan’s Kaiji Press that this year would be the most difficult year for the shipping industry, which has been struggling with overcapacity and falling volume, the Commercial Times reported.
However, the company, like other major shipping lines in the world, was also under pressure from declining rates, especially as freight prices on some US and European routes are already at below cost price.
The Transpacific Stabilization Agreement (TSA), of which Evergreen is a member, announced on Tuesday that the shipping alliance plans to raise US$500 for each 40-foot box on Asia-US routes beginning on Aug. 10. The shippers will also raise fuel levies and may add peak-season surcharges, the 14-member group said.
Lin said Evergreen would raise the rates next month, even though the plan is a “voluntary guideline” for TSA members. He did not elaborate on the increased fuel levies and surcharges.
On July 1, Evergreen said it and Cosco Container Industries Ltd (中遠集裝箱運輸公司) had agreed to combine their services on Far East-South America routes and Far East-Africa Express routes into a new service, to cope with soaring bunker prices in light of deteriorating market conditions.
The new service, which started on Monday, operates with a total of 11 3,500 TEU vessels, with seven vessels from Evergreen and four from Cosco Container, Evergreen said on its Web site.
Sweeping policy changes under US Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr are having a chilling effect on vaccine makers as anti-vaccine rhetoric has turned into concrete changes in inoculation schedules and recommendations, investors and executives said. The administration of US President Donald Trump has in the past year upended vaccine recommendations, with the country last month ending its longstanding guidance that all children receive inoculations against flu, hepatitis A and other diseases. The unprecedented changes have led to diminished vaccine usage, hurt the investment case for some biotechs, and created a drag that would likely dent revenues and
Global semiconductor stocks advanced yesterday, as comments by Nvidia Corp chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) at Davos, Switzerland, helped reinforce investor enthusiasm for artificial intelligence (AI). Samsung Electronics Co gained as much as 5 percent to an all-time high, helping drive South Korea’s benchmark KOSPI above 5,000 for the first time. That came after the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index rose more than 3 percent to a fresh record on Wednesday, with a boost from Nvidia. The gains came amid broad risk-on trade after US President Donald Trump withdrew his threat of tariffs on some European nations over backing for Greenland. Huang further
Macronix International Co (旺宏), the world’s biggest NOR flash memory supplier, yesterday said it would spend NT$22 billion (US$699.1 million) on capacity expansion this year to increase its production of mid-to-low-density memory chips as the world’s major memorychip suppliers are phasing out the market. The company said its planned capital expenditures are about 11 times higher than the NT$1.8 billion it spent on new facilities and equipment last year. A majority of this year’s outlay would be allocated to step up capacity of multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash memory chips, which are used in embedded multimedia cards (eMMC), a managed
CULPRITS: Factors that affected the slip included falling global crude oil prices, wait-and-see consumer attitudes due to US tariffs and a different Lunar New Year holiday schedule Taiwan’s retail sales ended a nine-year growth streak last year, slipping 0.2 percent from a year earlier as uncertainty over US tariff policies affected demand for durable goods, data released on Friday by the Ministry of Economic Affairs showed. Last year’s retail sales totaled NT$4.84 trillion (US$153.27 billion), down about NT$9.5 billion, or 0.2 percent, from 2024. Despite the decline, the figure was still the second-highest annual sales total on record. Ministry statistics department deputy head Chen Yu-fang (陳玉芳) said sales of cars, motorcycles and related products, which accounted for 17.4 percent of total retail rales last year, fell NT$68.1 billion, or
RSS