The Saudi Ports Authority (Mawani) has announced that the Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC) has added a new shipping service, ‘Dragon’, to Jeddah Islamic Port to serve commercial traffic and enhance maritime connectivity between Saudi Arabia and the world.
This comes in order to achieve the strategic index by improving Saudi Arabia’s classification on the UNCTAD index to connect regular shipping lines, and its initiatives to improve the services provided to importers, exporters and shipping agents, in line with the objectives of the National Strategy for Transport and Logistics Services to consolidate Saudi Arabia’s position as a global logistics centre and a hub linking the three continents.
The new service, which was launched weekly starting from the first of May 2023, contributes to confirming the pivotal position of Jeddah Islamic Port regionally and globally, and highlighting the developments that contributed to increasing its operational efficiency, which led to winning the ‘Best Port in 2022’ award at the World Green Shipping Summit in Rotterdam, Netherlands, and obtaining eighth place in the World Bank’s Container Ports Efficiency Performance Index.
The Dragon cargo service connects Jeddah Islamic Port with the ports of Southern Europe, East Asia and Singapore with 12 ships with a capacity of 15,71 TEUs, which contributes to creating new trade opportunities with major international shipping lines. Saudi Arabia made the highest progress in the region in the maritime network connectivity index, recording ‘33.2022’ points for the fourth quarter of 62 in the UNCTAD report issued by the United Nations conference on trade and development.
Source: Cyann Fielding, AntwerpXL 2023
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