The Italian shipping company, Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC), continues to transport certain types of goods to/from Russian ports, the CFTS portal reports, citing the Russian-based Interfax news agency.
According to the news agency, MSC said in the latest notice to its Russian customers that there were no changes in the transportation of Russian cargo after March 1 and that it was currently accepting essential goods such as food (food products), medicines, medical equipment, and humanitarian goods for transportation.
MSC has extended the ocean route of its "banana" service from Ecuador, adding a call at St. Petersburg to the service. According to the Marine Traffic portal, the MSC Zlata R container ship made its first call at Container Terminal St. Petersburg (CTSP) last week. The replacement of a feeder service with a deep-sea service made it possible to deliver containers to the Russian Federation directly without reloading in European ports. Previously, MSC’s refrigerated containers from Ecuador were unloaded in the port of Rotterdam before being transported to Russia by feeder ships.
It is also being reported that applications for ship calls at container terminals in St. Petersburg were placed this week by MSC (two vessels), Chinese-based COSCO, French-based СMA CGM, and Unifeeder (one vessel each).
As reported, the CFTS portal leaned from two operators on the maritime container transportation market this week that MSC only pretended to stop working with the Russian Federation. In reality, it plans to open a new service to Russia under the pretext of delivering food cargoes.
The CFTS portal contacted MSC, asking it to confirm or deny this information, but it received no response.
Earlier, the world’s leading shipping companies Maersk, Ocean Network Express, Yang Ming, Hapag-Lloyd, and HMM announced that they were suspending operations with the Russian Federation.
