Hyundai-owned car carrier Glovis has announced it will spend $191.5m on orders for three new pure car and truck carriers (PCTCs) to meet demand from Hyundai and its affiliate Kia Motors.
Glovis has said it plans to ship around 440,000 vehicles made by Hyundai and Kia this year. Each of the new order carriers will have a capacity for 6,000 cars.
It stated that the order will be placed through “a fair bidding” process following speculation that Hyundai Heavy Industries could win the order.
Glovis was previously responsible for moving finished vehicles from production sites to ports where vehicles were handed over to Eukor Car Carriers but last June Glovis reported it was planning deep-sea vehicle exports for its partner of 20% in 2010 and up to 50% by 2015.
However, Eukor also announced it had extended its contract with Hyundai-Kia until 2016 and said it would retain the majority of the volumes.
According to Ritchie Kim, general manager of Glovis’ business team, it is a question of sharing the orders. “I don’t want to say we’re competitors,” he saidin a recent interview in Seoul for Finished Vehicle Logistics. “We share these partners [and] we are sharing the market.”
This latest announcement follows an investment by Glovis in three vessels which were delivered in July last year – two second-hand ships with a capacity of 4,000 vehicles and one with a capacity of 6,000 cars (read more here).
“We now have our own vessel fleet,” said Kim, who added that Glovis had prepared several vessels over the past few years in anticipation of expanding into to deep-sea transportation for Kia and Hyundai.
From this year Glovis said it will manage routes from Korea to the Middle East, South East Asia and South America, as well as 25% of Kia and Hyundai exports to the west coast of North America.
Kia sold over a million vehicles across the globe in 2009, a year on year increase of 20%, which was dramatic given the global downturn. Consequently, its logistics teams have had to work quickly to ship cars from Korea to markets across the globe.
Read more on Kia and Glovis’s 2010 logistics strategies in the April-June issue of Finished Vehicle Logistics magazine.
