The vessel also joins the other sister-ships ordered by the ship-owner MSC Mediterranean Shipping Company. This call confirms once more the unique assets that HAROPA, the leading French port complex formed by the ports of Le Havre, Rouen and Paris, offers for accommodating the shipping companies and their mega-ships. The MSC OSCAR strengthens the trade offer of MSC which provides connections to around a hundred ports in the world via HAROPA.
Delivered in January by the DSME shipyard in Geoje (South Korea), the MSC Oscar breaks the record of the world largest container vessel, with a capacity of 19,224 TEU. The MSC OSCAR should thus be able to load a cargo volume equivalent to 163 million bottles of wine or 2.4 million microwave ovens.
The requirements of some port infrastructures (especiallyin Europe) have obliged the ship-owner to limit the length of the ship (395.4 m) which, however, gained width (59 m), keeping a 16 m draught; she has a deadweight tonnage up to 196,000 tonnes. With an optimized hull shape for business speeds lower than before, the maximum speed of the vessel is higher than 22 knots.
This first call confirms the trust that ship-owners and major alliances give to HAROPA, one of the few ports in the North-European range able to accommodate the largest fully laden container vessels 24/7. Owing to its nautical qualities, its reliability and the performance of all port services, HAROPA durably forms part of the logistics schemes of the world shipping leaders.
The MSC OSCAR is operated on the “ALBATROSS” Asia-Europe service. This service directly links the Asian ports of Dalian, Busan, Qingdao, Ningbo, Shanghai, Xiamen, Yantian, Tanjung Pelepas to the port of Le Havre – the 1st port of call on the North-European range – and offers excellent transit-times (24 days between Yantian and Le Havre, 28 days for Shanghai). The barge connections provided by the MSC ship-owner between Le Havre and Rouen also enable importers based in the hinterland of the Upper-Normandy capital city to have really short transit-times with the customs facilitations adapted to river transport. These river-sea facilitations are extended on the wholeSeine artery and especially to the port of Gennevilliers which concentrates an important share of the imports from Asia.