Taiwanese container carrier Evergreen Line has teamed up with Turkey’s Arkas Line on a new West – East Med Service (WEM) which will connect the Aegean Sea, the Near East and the Western Mediterranean.
With a port rotation of Valencia, Castellon, Barcelona, Fos, Cagliari, Piraeus, Beirut, Mersin, Iskenderun, Latakia, Alexandria (Dekheila), Izmir, Piraeus and Valencia within a 28 day schedule, the service will be operated with four vessels, one supplied by Evergreen and three by Arkas.
The WEM includes a pivotal call at Piraeus, which is a key network hub for Evergreen in the Mediterranean. The line has four weekly, line-haul, Asia-Med-Europe calls at Piraeus.
These four services (ADR, MD1, NE2 and NE7) in fact all make double calls at the port for import and export purposes.
Evergreen Line plans to launch two additional feeder services: the LEV2 (Levant service 2) linking Piraeus to Mersin, courtesy of a slot exchange agreement reached with Arkas/Emes, and the PSI (Piraeus-South Italy) shuttle service connecting Piraeus to Bari, in Southern Italy.