[ Wallenius Lines Orders 10th Ship from Korea ]

The contract for a further specially-designed car-carrier from Korea’
s Daewoo Okpo Shipyard was signed on Tueseday afternoon at Wallenius L
ines’ head office in Stockholm, by Mr Woo Choong Kim, Chairman of the
Daewoo Group, and Mr Christer Olsson, President of Wallenius Lines.
The new vessel will be a PCTC ship(Pure Car Truck Carrier) capable of
taking up to 5,850 car or a combination of 3,000 cars and 475 heavy ve
hicles. The vehicles can be loaded quickly and efficiently onto the sh
ip’s thirteen decks via an internal ramp system. Sone decks will be s
trengthened to take heavy vehicles, and the height of others will be a
djustable for high units.
Wallenius Lines in in the middle of an extensive newbuilding programme
to enlarge and modernise its fleet. This new order is for the 10th in
a series of car-carriers to be ordered from the same shipyard in Kore
a. Six of the ships have already been delivered, the first in 1994 and
the sixth as recently as this February. Three of the four remaining n
ewbuildings will be delivered in 1999 and the fourth in 2000.
Considerable advances have been made in both cargo handling and marine
equipment since the first Daewoo ship was built, and the vessels have
been successively developed and equipped with the very latest equipme
nt and technology. The Daewoo series consists of three generations of
vessels, and Newbuilding No 10 will be one of four in the third genera
tion.
Wallenius Lines, which is the world’s fourth largest transoceanic car
-carrying shipping line, carried 1,165,000 vehicles in its global traf
fic last year. This is an increase of 20 percent on the previous year.
The fleet, including ships on order and chartered vessels, now consist
s of 40 custom-built PCTC vessels.