Yemen Monitor/Newsroom
Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd have announced that their ships will avoid the Red Sea due to ongoing security concerns and will instead use the Cape of Good Hope in their new alliance, “Gemini Cooperation,” starting from February 2025.
The two shipping giants, Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd, confirmed that their new alliance, “Gemini Cooperation,” will bypass the Red Sea and instead use the Cape of Good Hope for its operations, starting from February 1, 2025.
This decision, announced in a joint statement, is driven by ongoing security concerns in the Red Sea, which has been plagued by attacks on ships by Iranian-backed Houthi rebels since 2023.
The Gemini alliance, named after the Latin and English word for “twins,” aims to boost schedule reliability to over 90%.
The original network options, which were defined in September 2024, included resuming the Red Sea route or diverting it via the longer Cape of Good Hope. After further evaluation, the companies decided to implement the Cape of Good Hope route amidst the continued volatility of the situation in the Red Sea.
The shipping companies announced that they would return to the Red Sea route when it becomes safe to do so.
The “Gemini Cooperation” project will require around 340 vessels, compared to around 300 vessels that could have been used if the companies had resumed operations via the Red Sea. The longer route also requires a larger container capacity, with the Cape route requiring approximately 3.7 million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs), compared to 3.4 million TEUs for the Red Sea route.
Both Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd have avoided the Red Sea since January 2024, as the companies adjusted their routes due to the increasing threat of attacks in the region, a situation that has continued to escalate.
