H'egh Autoliners and A.P. Moller ' Maersk, through its subsidiary Maersk Shipping Singapore, have agreed that effective from February 1, 2007, they have entered into cooperation with their respective fleets of car carriers.
The cooperation will commercially operate the combined fleet of about 67 vessels globally under the name of H'egh Autoliners, from H'egh Autoliners offices in Oslo.
H'egh Autoliners and A.P. Moller - Maersk each remains individually responsible for the technical management and crewing of own vessels.
The new cooperation is established to provide increased capacity, faster transit times and higher frequency to meet customers requirements. The Car carriers owned by Maersk Shipping Singapore will enter the cooperation as time charter commitments expire.
H'egh Autoliners' strategy is to grow with its global customers and offer worldwide transportation services with basis in the core competencies as a port to port transportation provider and to be a network partner providing effective logistics solutions.
'Our customer oriented business approach remains at the core of the business model and our customers' cargo projections motivate our ambitions to grow,' says Thor J'rgen Guttormsen, CEO of H'egh Autoliners. 'The cooperation with A.P.Moller - Maersk improves our ability to meet our customers' requirements for services and transportation volume.'
Maersk Shipping Singapore owns a fleet of Ro/Ro car carriers which historically have been chartered out to the Car Liner Operators. 'We are looking forward to enter into this cooperation with H'egh Autoliners. We believe in H'egh Autoliners' customer oriented strategy and expect the cooperation will make a strong product even stronger. We believe we can contribute positively to the cooperation based on our Groups capabilities within global transport and logistics' says S'ren Skou, Group Executive Board Member, A.P. Moller - Maersk.
Customer driven growth
The world production of factory new cars has grown steadily to about 62 million units in 2006. World car production is expected to continue growing to about 90 million units in 2015 representing an annual growth rate of three to four percent. Historically about 15% of the production volume is exported overseas.
In addition the globalization of the car manufacturing industry has brought about structural changes to production models, which is affecting seaborne transportation positively resulting in additional growing demand for transportation services.
On this background H'egh Autoliners expects the market for ro/ro car carriers to remain strong and has experienced growing interest from customers to secure future transportation capacity.
