August 26 - Safmarine has reshuffled a number of its existing West Africa shipping services and introduced three new services - the WAF11, WAF12 and WAF13 - as part of its revised West Africa service portfolio.
According to Dirk Geens (pictured below), Safmarine's Africa trade director: "The changes have been made in the interests of providing our global customer base with improved transit times and reliability.
"Increasing the number of services overall has not only allowed us to reduce the number of port calls on some of the existing West African services, but it will also give us greater flexibility when it comes to handling volume overflows."
Geens says the three new services - WAF 11, WAF 12 and WAF 13 - will serve the market between Europe and West Africa but also the other markets that we serve through transshipment in Port Tangier or Algeciras, particularly Asia, the Americas, Middle East and the Indian Subcontinent. The overall network will offer competitive and improved transit times to all key ports in West Africa.
"For example, transit times from Algeciras to Onne have decreased from 21 to 14 days and from Algeciras to Cotonou from 20 to 12 days."
Safmarine says the West Africa service enhancements have been done to meet the needs of its customers, who require a reliable, efficient and professional service provided by people with an in-depth knowledge of shipping across the globe.
Port rotations for WAF 11, WAF 12 and WAF 13 are as follows:
WAF 11: Algeciras (Spain) - Port Tangier Mediterranee (Morocco) - Lome (Togo) - Onne (Nigeria)
WAF 12: Algeciras (Spain) - Port Tangier Mediterranee (Morocco) - Abidjan (Ivory Coast) - Cotonou (Benin)
WAF 13: Algeciras (Spain) - Port Tangier Mediterranee (Morocco) - Dakar (Senegal)
