Discount Retail Chain Lidl International (owned by the German Schwarz Group) started the venture Tailwind Shipping Lines & Co., a subsidiary of the German discount chain Lidl. To maintain the stability of its supply chain, Lidl has purchased and chartered four large container ships under the name Wiking to operate the China-Europe line, with stops at key ports in China, Slovenia, Spain and the Netherlands.
A new Wiking container liner shipping route between Taicang in the eastern Chinese province of Jiangsu and Rotterdam in the Netherlands started on Sunday. The German ship Wiking is the first container ship to be commissioned on the liner shipping route between Taicang and Rotterdam. It measures 255.33 meters in length and is loaded with 2,000 TEU.
Currently, one trip every 16 days is planned on the route. The number of ships will increase in the future and be gradually adjusted to one trip per week, depending on the market situation.
“The goal is to be able to manage the increased volume of different production facilities more flexibly in the long term,” Wolf Tiedemann, who heads up logistics operations for the German retailer, told German logistics title VerkehrsRundschau earlier this month.
Lidl operates around 11,200 stores and is active in 32 countries, recently entering the US market.
See here for more: https://www.agf.nl/article/9446760/nieuwe-containerlijn-route-verbindt-taicang-met-rotterdam/