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Like their rivals across the East China Sea, South Korean carriers Hanjin Shipping and Hyundai Merchant Marine have experienced severe trading difficulties and both posted massive losses in 2013.
Indeed, this was the third consecutive year of red ink-stained results produced by Hanjin and HMM, and this combination of weak fundamentals and poor financial health is having an increasingly adverse affect on their all-important credit ratings.
Moreover, in newly-published reports from Drewry Financial Research Services, the transport consultant is not optimistic about the prospects of profitability for either South Korean carrier this year or the next, with a return to the black “unlikely” before 2016 for HMM and a year later for its compatriot carrier.
More at The Loadstar

Zim has announced the imminent launch of an enhanced service structure between Asia and the West Coast of North America after it
agreed to expand its cooperation with the G6 Alliance.
The Israeli ocean carrier said the new service, comprising three weekly loops offering improved transit times, increased frequencies and extended port coverage, will launch in mid-May.
Zim has been partnering with three of the G6 carriers — Hapag-Lloyd, NYK and OOCL — on the route since 2009.
More at the Journal of Commerce

For a week in June, about 20 Russian emergency-management experts and scientists and their U.S. counterparts were planning to tour Alaska natural disaster landmarks, sharing information about lessons learned and risks avoided.
Now the summit is off. The U.S. State Department pulled the funding, making the Alaska hazards-reduction workshop a casualty of the conflict over Ukraine.
The June event was one of several multinational Arctic projects that have been damaged — or are at risk of being damaged — by political tensions in Ukraine. Canadian officials last month boycotted an Arctic Council working-group meeting in Moscow, a decision intended to show what that nation’s environmental minister said is a “principled stand” against Russian actions.
More at the Anchorage Daily News

Ecuador’s government has told the U.S. Agency for International Development that it will not renew its agreements with
the South American country, according a letter obtained by The Associated Press.
The Nov. 26 letter sent to the U.S. Embassy in the Ecuadorean capital of Quito says, the “USAID must not execute any new activity,” nor widen any existing projects in Ecuador.
Relations between the two countries have been tense since President Rafael Correa assumed power in 2007.
Ecuador expelled two U.S. Embassy officials in 2009, accusing them of interfering in the country’s internal affairs.
Read the rest at the Washington Post

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