Update on Canada-Europe Trade

The Canadian trade is currently facing severe operational limitations due to continuing low water levels in St Lawrence River, since June 2021. We are further facing schedule reliability issues due to terminal congestion both in North Europe and North America, and the Canada trade in particular has experienced operational bottlenecks in Montreal due to the strike action in April 2021 and construction works in June 2021.

The persisting low water levels in St Lawrence River are expected to continue for some time. We are continuously monitoring this situation closely and will make every endeavor to use the maximum permitted capacity on our vessels to ensure that we meet your transport and logistics needs, whilst doing so safely. In the interim, please be advised that these low water levels will prevent us from being able to fully cater for all of your bookings as we had initially planned. We anticipate that some containers will need to be rolled as vessel intake must be monitored to ensure that we can safely navigate our vessels in low water conditions.

Despite the uncontrollable low water situation, we are doing everything we can to clear the backlog and are further evaluating alternative routing options via US ports connecting to Canada destinations via inland. We are experiencing limited flexibility due to capacity and infrastructure limitations via US inland locations.

We thank you for your support and should you have any questions, please feel free to contact your local Maersk professional.