At a time when many new entrants to container shipping are pulling back amid loss making freight rates, one German supermarket-backed line is doubling down.
Tailwind Shipping Lines, founded last year by Lidl, one of Europe’s largest retail chains, is launching a new service from Bangladesh to Europe with a focus on the textile trades.
The Tiger Express service has a fast transit time of less than 20 days between Chittagong and Barcelona. The first vessel on the service departs from Barcelona on March 6. Three ships with an average size of 900 teu are being deployed on the route.
“Thanks to the ships we use, we can reach the region without a stopover or reloading. The direct connection between Bangladesh and Europe in particular represents a major gain in efficiency, with which we also support the reliability of the supply chains for our customers,” said Wolf Tiedemann, managing director of Tailwind.
Tailwind also highlighted in a release the advantages of calling smaller ports, both in Barcelona and in Moerdijk in the Netherlands, where the goods can be loaded onto trucks in a comparatively short time and transported directly destinations.
Tailwind launched its Panda Express service from China to Europe last year. The route goes from Taicang via Ningbo and Shenzhen to Koper, Barcelona and Rotterdam.
During the global supply chain crunch experienced during the pandemic a host of well-known retail names including Ikea, Walmart and Home Depot opted to charter in their own ships.
Many other companies also decided to enter the fray, attracted by the record profits container shipping was making over the last couple of years. This trend has now reversed.
Splash reported last week on the demise of Brisbane-based Focus Container Line, which only started operating in November.
The dramatic drop in earnings – combined with high charter costs – has seen a number of smaller liner operators pull back with the first financial casualty registered in the UK where an administrator was appointed in December to oversee the bankruptcy of Allseas Global Project Logistics, which had entered the Asia-Europe trades in the middle of 2021.
