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Premier Alliance Schedule Details Continue to Emerge Despite FMC Investigation
2024-12-11 08:06

Premier Alliance Schedule Details Continue to Emerge Despite FMC Investigation

by Destine Ozuygur •

On December 4th, our team published a bulletin on the first Premier Alliance sailings discovered in ONE’s long-term schedules that had yet to be corroborated by other alliance partners HMM and YML.

Two days later, other sources like the Journal of Commerce began to report that the Premier Alliance had finally revealed many of their upcoming 2025 voyages in an official First Sailings advisory. However, the news came hand-in-hand with the announcement that the Federal Maritime Commission had decided to stall the official start dates in February in order to investigate the competitive impact of the alliance.

As with last week’s eeSea article regarding variance in the current scope of details available across Gemini services, not all Premier services publicize the same scope of detail. Some are still lacking corroboration from one or more alliance partners at this time, others have just one or two vessels out of a dozen available slots, and some are near-complete aside from missing arrival/departure details for a single port of call.

The Asia - Europe PMR - FE5 for example, only has 1 of 15 available slots allotted and all information is still available solely from ONE. The PMR - FE3 provides a counter example on the same trade, with 12 out of 15 slots available and information corroborated by each carrier. Despite such caveats, there does seem to be more attention given to completeness on the North-American service schedules, where the majority of Premier’s competitive advantage is focused.

Services like the PMR - PS4 and PMR - PS6 (where WHL will notably participate) to the West Coast, already have complete lineups. Some first sailings like the CONTI CONQUEST - upcoming deployment on the PMR - PS3 - have live eeSea forecast coverage including departure from Port Klang on February 02, 2025. The PMR - PS5 and PMR - PN4, with Los Angeles and Vancouver as their respective first discharge ports, have been postponed until May.

The PMR - PN4 in particular may have significant impact in its postponement as it’s the largest of 4 services that will be calling Vancouver with a weekly frequency. Not only is it expected to have an average vessel capacity of 10K TEU - but it also provides the shortest total roundtrip of 42 days with just 4 ports of call: Ningbo, Shanghai, Vancouver, and Tacoma. This may position the service with the ability to maintain exceptional schedule reliability once it does commence.

While the duration of the FMC investigation may necessitate adjustments to these first sailing schedules, our team continues to regularly populate the details as they become available in the eeSea database. Our analysts have also made the decision this week to officially eliminate the service versions that had represented possible Suez Canal passage utilization in early 2025.

While there is not yet an official statement from Premier Alliance on the matter, the transit times available in their long-term schedules and first sailings indicate no imminent intentions to pass through the Suez. As is the consensus for the likes of Hapag Lloyd and Maersk Line, it appears there will be no shortage of preference for passage past the Cape of Good Hope for many months to come.

For more information on vessel deployments, ports of call, the first live Premier Alliance eeSea forecasts - please visit our eeSea Signals below or reach out to our team for the full summary of service-by-service details updated daily.

eeSea Signals