French container ship docks at Koja

JAKARTA (JP): CMA CGM, a major French shipping line, launched on Tuesday the service of its 4,000 20-foot equivalent units (TEUs) container ship to meet the growing demand of the country's exporters.

Ronald Manurung, general manager of CMA CGM Indonesia, said the Ville de' Orion, the largest cargo ship serving Indonesia, would serve the Koja container terminal at Tanjung Priok Port once a week.

The US$70 million, 259-meter-long ship will serve ports between Indonesia and North Asia, then sail to the west coast of the United States.

"We are confident of being the pioneer serving Jakarta with the latest generation of full container vessels, unlike all our competitors who use Singapore as a port of transshipment", said Ronald.

Ronald said the French shipping line, which at present calls 11 times at Indonesian container terminals a month, carried 62,200 containers of TEU capacity to and from Indonesia last year.

"We hope we will be able to carry 80,000 TEUs this year," he said.

Koja Container Port, which is operated by PT Humpus Terminal Peti Kemas, handled 500,000 TEUs this year, an increase of 25 percent from 400,000 TEUs in 1999 and 300,000 TEUs in 1998, the port's deputy general manager Ferdy B. Madian said.

Several major shipping lines such as NYK, PSK, Norasia and Mitsui OSK also use the container port.

He said that loading and unloading activities from the ships still ran smoothly because the port's occupancy rate was still below 70 percent. (07)