The CKYH Alliance has announced that it will slash capacity by 10% on the Asia/US West Coast (USWC) and by 20% on the Asia/US East Coast (USEC) trades as part of its seasonal adjustment programme.

CKYH partners COSCON, K Line, Yang Ming and Hanjin Shipping Alliance said they had decided to carry out the program in order to cope with decreasing demand as well as rising fuel costs.

Hiroki Yamakoshi, executive, planning team, container business, K Line, told CI that while the exact details of the rationalisation in the Asia/USWC trade was still awaited, capacity was being cut in the Asia/USEC market by cancelling one of the five services each week. Therefore, in the 20-week winter plan, each of the five strings is being suspended for a total of four weeks each. The seasonal programme kicked off on November 14, when the AWE5 service was stopped for a week; this week, the AWE4 is suspended, next week it will be the AWE2, the following week the AWE3 and finally the AWE1, before the rotation starts all over again.

Yamakoshi told CI: 'We cannot stop one specific service, therefore if we cancel each in turn then it is only one week in five that a service is stopped and we have coverage with the other four strings we need some capacity to be minimised.'

The CKYH said in a statement: 'With an even more rationalised and effective fleet operation, we believe we will be able to provide stable and satisfying service to our valued customers, especially under the current economic climate.'

CKYH's announcement follows the news that The New World Alliance (TNWA) and the Grand Alliance (GA) are cutting capacity by about 4,000TEU on the Asia/US USEC tradelane by joining forces as part of their winter programmes.

The need to cut capacity on the north east Asia/US tradelane is shown by JoC PIERS data which reveals that for Q2 09, trade on the North East Asia/USEC tradelane slumped by 14.9% to 548,440TEU, compared to the same period the previous year. While cargo volumes from North East Asia/USWC fell by 21% to 1,511,289TEU compared to Q2 08.