Wellington, July 15 NZPA - Two container shipping services between New Zealand and North Asia are being combined and the shipping lines concerned say it is because of a deteriorating market situation.

Hamburg Sud said its Asia, Australia and New Zealand Service (ANZL) service and the Cosco Container Lines (Coscon) and ICS consortium's Asia service will be combined and will operate weekly, arriving on fixed days.

Hamburg Sud has Hapag-Lloyd as a charterer of slots on the service and Coscon, and ICS, with Mitsui OSK Line (MOL) and Nippon Yusen Kasha Line (NYK), has Maersk as a slot charterer.

The new service will use six modern vessels capable of carrying 3000 to 3500 TEU, or standard-sized containers, Hamburg Sud and Coscon will each provide two vessels, while MOL and NYK will contribute one each.

The service will travel from Auckland to New Plymouth, Nelson, Wellington, Lyttelton, Napier, Tauranga, Tokio, Kobe, Busan, Shanghai, Yantian, Hong Kong, Brisbane then Auckland. The calls at Nelson and Wellington are fortnightly.

Industry observers said that generally container vessels coming to New Zealand are carrying fewer imports due to the recession. The vessels are full and extra ones have had to be put on during the export season but in the off season export volumes will also be lower.

Shipping lines have a choice of running larger vessels capable of handling the peak or matching capacity with demand for most of the year and putting extra vessels on for the export peak.

The partners in this new consortium have committed to a peak-season extra-loader programme, which will ensure that all refrigerated trade volumes will be adequately accommodated.

Vessels coming to New Zealand require a large number of plugs for refrigerated containers.