2M PARTNERS Maersk and the Mediterranean Shipping Co (MSC) will begin calling the Port of Jacksonville's Blount Island Marine Terminal in July with a new service from North China and South Korea, reports American Shipper.

"What better way to illustrate JAXPORT's increasingly visible role in international trade than to welcome the world's largest container line," said the ports chief commercial officer Roy Schleicher.

Maersk is calling the service, which will transit the Panama Canal, the TP10 and MSC is calling it the New Everglades service. It will deploy 10 panamaxes with an average capacity of 4,500 TEU.

The New Everglades-TP10 will rotate through Savannah, Charleston, Jacksonville, Miami, Xingang, Qingdao, Busan, Cristobal and back to Savannah.

The Panama Canal routing was a reversal of sorts for Maersk, said American Shipper. "Back in 2013, the carrier combined a string that used the Panama Canal with one that was routed through the Suez Canal in order to use larger ships and take advantage of the economy of scale provided by larger vessels," it said. 

At the time, a Maersk executive said it was "difficult for me to see how any service going through the Panama Canal that serves Asia to the US east coast could possibly be making money." 

But bunker costs have fallen sharply since then and carriers are having fresh thoughts about the economics of the Panama route, especially now that much larger ships will be able to transit the canal next year.