Jeddah Islamic Port has today received the first vessel on the Himalaya Express shipping service, which was added by the Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC), a global leader in transportation and logistics. The new shipping service connects the Kingdom to 260 global ports that are dotted across Northern Europe, the Americas, the Mediterranean Sea, the Red Sea, the Indian Subcontinent, and Eastern Asia, thereby boosting imports and exports as well as expanding shipping operations to and from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The Himalaya Express service directly links Jeddah Islamic Port and the ports of Colombo, Nhava Sheva, Mundra, Salalah, King Abdullah, Valencia, Felixstowe, Rotterdam, Hamburg, and Antwerp through 11 motherships out of 730 vessels that have an average carrying capacity of 14,000 TEUs. The addition of Jeddah to MSC's service follows strategic efforts to expand liner shipping networks that connect the Kingdom to the rest of the world, adding new shipping services, including seven new routes between Jeddah Islamic Port and ports in the East and West, to boost trade in line with the objectives of the National Transport and Logistics Strategy (NTLS) to transform Saudi Arabia into a global logistics hub. The Saudi Ports Authority (Mawani) aims to build a world-class maritime sector that boasts ten state-of-the-art ports situated on the strategic corridor connecting three major continents besides improving the Kingdom's score in the Logistics Performance Index and expanding the overall container throughput capacity. The Kingdom had recorded a remarkable rise in the 2021 Liner Shipping Connectivity Index (LSCI) issued by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) by attaining a score of 70.68, which firmly establishes its leadership regionally and translates the national drive to bolster the competitiveness and presence of the local maritime sector at the regional and global scale.
