COSCON to Enhance CUE Service

To catch up with the booming market of Central/South America and provide more competitive service to customers, COSCON and Evergreen will separate the jointly operated CUE Service and each party will launch an Asia/Central America service independently from early June, 2008. COSCON's new service is still named as CUE, and Evergreen's called FPS.

A total of seven high speed 2800TEU class container ships will be deployed in the new CUE service of COSCON. The new service will call at the following ports in turn: Shanghai-Ningbo-Yantian-Hong Kong-Lazaro Cardenas (Mexico)-Balboa-Shanghai

The benefits offered by COSCON's CUE service include:

1.The transit time from the Far East to Central America will be significantly shortened by up to 3-4 days due to high speed vessel introduced.

2.It will provide a congestion-free trade corridor between the Far East and Central/South America by calling Balboa with rail connection to Cristobal. It will avoid possible delay caused by the congestion of Panama Canal.

3.The Caribbean market will be better covered by choosing the Port of Balboa as the transit hub to the South America and using Cristobal's feeder service to this area. And also, COSCON will be dedicated in extending service coverage to meet customers' requirements.