Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC) has announced the reintroduction of its Dragon service from Asia to the Mediterranean.
The service will connect Asia to Israel, Italy, and South France, and provide the first direct call into Naples to get the best coverage in the South Italian market.
The Dragon service will also deliver fast connections into the Tyrrhenian region and South of France. With a newly introduced call at Ashdod Hadarom, MSC will provide full coverage of Asia into the Israeli market, together with a direct Haifa call on Phoenix service.
The full rotation of the Dragon service will be:
Shanghai – Ningbo – Yantian – Singapore – Ashdod (HCT) – Naples – La Spezia – Genoa – Fos sur Mer – Gioia Tauro – King Abdullah – Singapore – Shanghai.
The Dragon service was initially a joint 2M service labelled AE20 by Maersk, but it was discontinued in the early pandemic phase of 2020.
MSC is relaunching the service on 15 March, which appears to be the first divergence between MSC and Maersk following the 2M break-up announcement according to global shipping expert and CEO of Vespucci Maritime, Lars Jensen.
There are already services in the Pacific that the two carriers offer independently, but this is a new development in the Asia-Europe market explained Jensen.
The ID-based pick-up process is part of the ongoing rollout of Secure Container Release (SCR) at MPET.
