Seatrade Reefer Chartering, operating the world's largest reefer owners pool with 120 vessels, and Nissui Shipping Corp. of Tokyo, controlling 30 reefer vessels, have established a joint venture based in Tokyo as from April 1, 2001

The new company, named Tokyo Reefer Chartering ( TRC ), will take responsibility for a substantial part of the present business of Nissui Shipping. The joint venture will provide the transportation of frozen fish on behalf of Nissui Shipping's parent company Nippon Suisan Kaisha, Ltd., a major quoted Japanese marine products and food company.

Tokyo Reefer Chartering will combine the flexibility of both fleets for fish, meat and fruit transport. The joint venture delivers a further step in the much needed consolidation in the specialized reefer industry with both companies working closely together to optimize the schedules for their respective fleets as well as to achieve operational synergies and savings by enabling fleets to be deployed more effectively.

Mr. Adachi, President of TRC comments that: "Both joint venture partners are confident that their combined efforts will provide customers with an even better service, at the same time providing improved load factors and schedules."

Located at the dockside in Antwerp; Seatrade Reefer Chartering is one of the world's major operators of fully refrigerated vessels ( over 120 ships with 38 million cubic feet of cargo capacity ) managing the fleet commercially and operationally through a world-wide network of agents. The joint venture between Seatrade Reefer Chartering and Nissui Shipping Corp marks a further consolidation of the over tonnaged refrigerated cargo trades. The initiative, comes at a time of deepening crisis for reefer operators while a high percentage of the fleet is lay-up. The reefer shipping industry is going through a difficult period. The reefer trades are suffering from surplus capacity, with current freight rates well below comparative levels of recent years.

Consolidation is essential for the refrigerated shipping industry, Seatrade has now made its contribution to the rationalization process. This new joint venture follows last year larger merger between Cool Carriers - Lauritzen Reefers which resulted in the formation of LauritzenCool. The Seatrade pool's fleet has more ships, but of smaller size in general, than LauritzenCool.

Container lines are taking away much of the traditional break bulk refrigerated cargo traffic. The reefer capacity of present big post-panamax containerships is almost double of the size of the largest reefer ships. Cargo is looking for "door to door refrigerated container transport". Impact of refrigerated containers is expected to grow on regular basis from now on. In response, latest generation of new building reefer ships have a considerable container capacity on deck.