Built at the shipyard of Ishikawajima-Harima Heavy Industries (IHI) in Kure, Japan, the container giant of the Danish shipping company is 335.50 meters long and 42.8 meters wide and has a slot space capacity of 8,466 TEU, plus 700 connections for reefer containers. With its full load of 97,517 tons, the ship reaches a maximum draft of 14 meters and a speed of 24.5 knots.
The ports served by the two services are as follows:
AE-1: Kobe (Osaka), Nagoya, Shimizu, Yokohama (Tokyo), Xiamen, Yantian (Shenzhen), Nansha (Guangzhou), Tanjung Pelepas, Rotterdam, Southampton, Hamburg, Malaga, Shekou (Shenzhen) ' then switching to the AE-8 circuit.
AE-8: Shekou (Shenzhen), Shanghai, Ningbo, Kaohsiung, Yantian (Shenzhen), Tanjung Pelepas, Valencia, Le Havre, Hamburg, Gothenburg, Arhus, Bremerhaven, Rotterdam, Singapore ' then switching to the AE-1 circuit.
Container shipments between Hamburg and Asia amounted to a total volume of 5.6 million containers (TEU) in 2007. The first seven months of the present year again show growth of the order of 2.7 percent. Far and away the most important trading partner of the Elbe port is VR China, with 3.2 million containers (TEU). Altogether the Port of Hamburg is now visited by 30 regular container services going to and from the Far East ' 26 of these put in at Chinese ports.