HMM is rebuilding its network around a hub-and-spoke model backed by 22 feeder ships on order through 2029, the South Korean carrier confirmed Wednesday.
The shift turns direct mainline calls at secondary Asian ports into feeder legs through a transshipment hub.
By the numbers: The orderbook covers 10 ships of 2,800 TEU at HD Hyundai and 12 vessels at China's Huanghai Shipbuilding, plus two 1,956-TEU newbuild resales bought this month at $33.5 million each.
The fleet rebuilds an intra-Asia business that shrank to a 0.5% share during Covid, when HMM shifted capacity to the transpacific and Asia-Europe lanes, where it holds about 5%.
Southeast Asia now accounts for 17% of HMM's container volume, up from 11% in 2020. A new West Africa loop with Japan's ONE launches in July, running five feeders from an Algeciras hub to Dakar, Tema, Lekki and Abidjan.
What changes for shippers: HMM's Premier Alliance has restructured Asia-Europe services this way since April: mainline calls concentrate on Shanghai and Busan, with dedicated feeders connecting Kaohsiung, Xiamen and Japanese ports.
Cargo that loaded straight onto a mainline vessel now takes a feeder leg plus a transshipment, typically days longer, with a missed-connection risk at the hub. The carriers say that tradeoff buys better end-to-end schedule reliability.
Across the sector: As recently as September 2024, Alphaliner reported that Premier and MSC would not adopt hub-and-spoke.
Sea-Intelligence has since measured Gemini, the Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd network built on hubs, at 90.7% schedule reliability in early 2025, the best of the alliance networks. MSC is the holdout, marketing roughly 1,900 direct port pairs; CEO Søren Toft argues clients want "certainty of a direct destination call."
What to watch: The shift lands first on port-pair routings and lead-time assumptions in Asia contracts written around direct calls, and on transshipment dwell at Busan as Premier concentrates volume there.
