With preternatural timing, Trump’s latest tweets targeting Vietnam's heavy presence in the apparel and footwear market in the US may have put Emirates Shipping Lines’ newest service in the crosshairs.
ESL announced the new Sun Chief Express weekly service connecting Ho Chi Minh City, Shekou, and Seattle as recently as June 26, with the first sailing of the 2.7K TEU vessel BRIGHT scheduled to depart Ho Chi Minh City on July 25. The service will be taking over the SWSPL - TPE that will completely phase out by the end of August.
There are currently seventeen other services providing port pairs from Vietnam to West Coast gateway ports, but just two call Seattle. It’s hard to imagine the carrier invested in this network addition without some sense of the risk involved, but it also means that we’ll be tracking their schedules closely for any updates, including blanked sailings. ESL currently participates on one other Far East - North America service, the ESL - MEX connecting Shanghai to Manzanillo.
The new string joins a slew of services that have been born of the tense balance between opportunity and vulnerability on the Transpacific, and are flagged with an uncertain future. We’ll cover those in more detail next week with our monthly North America update. In the meantime you can read about the rollercoaster summer that COSCO’s SEA3 has had so far here.
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