Amsterdam to Lose Last Regular Box Service

The port of Amsterdam risks disappearing from Europe's ocean container map, as its sole box terminal is about to lose its last major liner shipping service.

The Grand Alliance, a group of four ocean carriers, will end calls by its EU1 service at Amsterdam Container Terminal at the beginning of 2010, effectively wiping out the port's box traffic.

The weekly EU1 Europe-Japan service, renamed Loop A, will be switched to neighboring Rotterdam, Europe's biggest container port, as the Grand Alliance cuts winter capacity.

The loss of the EU1 service, following other Grand Alliance defections earlier in the year, comes just as Amsterdam was making headway in its effort to become a major European box port after years languishing in a container backwater.

Amsterdam's box traffic rose 10.2 percent in 2008 from the previous year to almost 425,000 20-foot equivalent units, outpacing its much bigger rivals, Antwerp, which grew just two percent, and Rotterdam where traffic stalled.

Amsterdam is a victim of a move by carriers to rationalize their Europe-Asia services by focusing calls on larger ports, notably Rotterdam, following sharp falls in cargo volume.

An added factor is that the Grand Alliance is introducing bigger ships with capacity up to 8,600 TEUs which cannot pass through the lock systems at the head of the canal that links Amsterdam to the open sea.

The Grand Alliance ended calls by its EU2 service at ACT in May and pulled out its EU5 loop at the beginning of the year, cutting the terminal's throughput by around 70 percent. Both services were switched to Rotterdam.

Rotterdam also is feeling the heat, as it will get only two of the three Grand Alliance loops that will replace the current four weekly services at the end of the year.

Amsterdam's loss of three mainstream services came less than a year after Hong Kong's Hutchison Port Holdings, the world's biggest container terminal operator, acquired control of ACT, then known as the Ceres terminal, from Japanese ocean carrier NYK.

In return, NYK, a member of the Grand Alliance, got a minority stake in Hutchison's ECT terminal in Rotterdam where the Amsterdam boxes are being switched.

Until then, NYK is said to have resisted calls by its Grand Alliance partners -- OOCL, Hapag-Lloyd and Malaysia's MISC -- to quit Amsterdam and concentrate all calls on Rotterdam.

The Amsterdam terminal opened in 2001 but didn't attract any regular services until mid-2005 despite its unique ability to handle vessels simultaneously from both sides.