Seeing that the past week has brought little changes in the weather conditions, low temperatures and heavy ice continuously cause operational problems at sea as well as in ports in Scandinavia, Baltic and Russia.
The situation in St. Petersburg and a number of Finnish ports continuously exceeds normal winter conditions. Moreover, a number of ports in Norway, Szczecin in Poland, and the Kiel Canal are now also affected by the weather conditions incipiently causing operational difficulties.
The ice has caused unforeseen changes and delays in schedules. Particularly the St. Petersburg service is affected by this, seeing that it has resulted in slow operation in general, increased waiting time due to limited ice breaking assistance, congestions at terminals, berthing queues and convoys in and out of the port.
Unifeeder is taking all operational measures in seeking to maintain schedule and secure weekly capacity. This includes chartering extra vessels in order to keep frequency and weekly capacity at an acceptable level, as well as to enable our customers to keep back-logs at Continential hubs and terminal storage costs at a minimum. Finally, the demand for ice classed vessels has increased. Thus, due to the ice development it may be expected that a lack of suitable available tonnage arises. Consequently, the weather and ice situation increases Unifeeder’s overall operational costs considerably.
Unifeeder is seeking to overcome the weather related obstacles with as little impact on our service level as possible. Unfortunately the situation is expected to become even more challenging in the next few weeks, and it cannot be avoided that it will affect our operation.
