Busan becomes stopover port for super large container vessels

BUSAN, Dec. 20 (Yonhap) -- South Korea's main sea port will become a regular stopover destination for very large foreign container vessels, the Busan Port Authority (BPA) said Saturday.

It said both Switzerland's Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC) and France-based
CMA-CGM will send ships with more than 10,000 twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs)
capacity to Busan.
The decision marks the first time that the world's fifth largest container port
will service ships of this size. The largest ship to use the port to date was a
9,600 TEU vessel operated by China Shipping Container Lines Co.
"The event should help Busan's status as an international port and boost efforts
to transform it into a logistics hub for Northeast Asia," a BPA official said.
In recent years the port, located 453 kilometers southeast of Seoul, saw its
ranking slide two notches following the emergence of Shanghai and Shenzhen in
China.
Authorities said MSC plans to dock its 11,700 TEU container ship Francesca at
Gamman pier on Tuesday with another vessel, the Ivana, which has a similar
load-carrying capacity, arriving on Dec. 29.
They also said CMA-CGM plans to dock a 10,000-plus TEU ship on Wednesday and
another on Dec. 30.
These ships are 347 by 364 meters long, have a beam of roughly 45 meters and have
a loaded draught of over 15 meters.