Evergreen Marine Corp (長榮海運) yesterday said it has become the nation’s first container shipper to save money by using the newly expanded Panama Canal after one of its vessels sailed through the Cocoli locks on Saturday last week.
The canal expansion project, which saw the construction of a third set of locks is expected to triple the cargo throughput, as larger vessels would be able to utilize the key conduit for global maritime trade, shipping industry experts have said.
The Ever Lambent, the company’s L-type 8,452 20-foot equivalent units (TEUs) container ship, which has a cargo capacity of 104,000 tonnes, made its way through the canal, the company said.
“The Ever Lambent is capable of carrying the same capacity of two conventional D-type Panamax vessels with a capacity of 4,200 TEUs, and yields 40 percent savings in fuel consumption and carbon emissions, representing a significant boost in efficiency and competitiveness for the company through lower per-unit operating costs,” Evergreen Marine public relations official John Chen (陳泰澄) told the Taipei Times by telephone.
The firm has initiated plans to change its fleet composition to gradually replace its Panamax vessels with ships whose capacities range between 4,000 TEUs and 5,000 TEUs, Chen said.
Panamax vessels are at an awkward place, as they are too small to be efficient in long-haul routes and too large to dock at smaller Southeast Asian ports in Indonesia and Malaysia, where shipping demand has remained steady, he said.
“We are still studying the expansion’s effects on the industry and the changes in fleet composition will begin with chartered ships as their contracts conclude,” Chen said, adding that hasty ship retirements would limit the company’s ability to seize opportunities during rebounds in shipping demand.
In addition, the company is to form slot-swapping partnerships — where shipping capacity, measured in TEUs, are reserved and swapped with other shippers on the US east coast.
In April, Evergreen Marine signed a memorandum of understanding with three foreign counterparts to form the Ocean Alliance, which is expected to begin operating in the first quarter of next year, while marking the company’s exit from the CKYHE Alliance, which it has been a member of since 2014.
Chen said the decision would yield greater synergistic gains, as the company’s strategy shares great similarities with prospective members of the Ocean Alliance.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained