Yang Ming Marine wins best intra-Asia shipper award
Yang Ming Marine Transport Corp., one of Taiwan's leading container shippers, announced Tuesday that it has been awarded the Best Intra-Asia Shipping Line title for 2012 by Cargonews Asia.
Yang Ming Marine said the award was presented by the Asian Freight and Supply Chain Awards (AFSCAs), organized by Cargonews Asia, which is the only newspaper in the world that targets the logistics and cargo supply chains in the Asia-Pacific region.
Yang Ming Marine said the award is a result of its intensive efforts to penetrate the Asia shipping market and improve services through market expansion.
The Taiwanese shipper said that since the Asia market has become more important than ever, the company is determined to build its Asian routes as a third pillar in addition to its routes to the Americas and Europe.
So far, Yang Ming Marine has assigned 35 vessels out of its fleet of 86 ships to serve 32 shipping routes in Asia, covering East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, the Middle East and Australia.
In 2011, the cargo loading volume on its Asian lines totaled 1.5 million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs), Yang Ming Marine said. A TEU is a standard measure of capacity in the container shipping industry.
Currently, Asian routes account for 20 to 30 percent of the shipper's total revenue, while European routes and American routes make up 70 to 80 percent of the revenue.
Yang Ming Marine said that since the beginning of the second quarter, demand for container shipping has been on the rise from a year earlier, a departure from a slowdown seen in the second half of last year and in the first half of this year.
Yang Ming Marine said that on the back of falling fuel prices, its bottom line is expected to rebound accordingly, adding that as the fourth quarter is peak season for the Asian shipping market, the shipper's operations are expected to improve quarter by quarter this year.
In the first quarter, Yang Ming Marine posted NT$1.91 (US$0.06) in loss per share, compared with NT$0.04 in earnings per share recorded over the same period of last year.
