By Jite Eriabie
Vietnam’s port of Qui Nhon is experiencing severe congestion as a storm in the area caused a number of vessels to sink, thereby blocking ship traffic in a nearby channel.
After the storm, which caused significant disruption at the port, hit the area on November 4, Qui Nhon port authority issued a temporary block of channel and limited the vessel traffic to ships with a maximum draft of 5.5 meters.
The authority also informed that the only allowed sailing time is from 6 am to 5 pm, until further notice. Vessels are now required to wait longer for a berth and extra transshipments are required which disrupts the weekly services from Qui Nhon.
In order to maintain a weekly service, Danish shipping company Maersk Line informed that it needs to deploy extra vessels that meet the requirement of port authority with accompanying additional bunker cost to mitigate expected delays. Therefore, the cost of operating a weekly vessel service from Durban “has increased significantly and unexpectedly,” Maersk said.
“In order to recover a portion of these incremental costs, we will be introducing an export congestion fee (CFO), applicable to all cargo moving in and out of Qui Nhon, effective November 15, 2017 for non-FMC corridors and December 15, 2017 for FMC corridors,” the shipping firm added.
The effective date is determined by the departure date (ETD) for non-FMC trades and gate-in date for FMC trades.
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