HÀ NỘI — The Vietnamese Representative Office of Hanjin Shipping Global, South Korea’s giant container shipping company, announced that it would not accept any new booking of freight orders from August 31.

According to the Ministry of Industry and Trade, bankruptcy of the Hanjin shipping line would possibly affect local businesses’ export and import shipping and receiving activities.

The ministry recommended businesses to quickly complete procedures to receive imported goods at the ports and take them out of the Hanjin containers. With regard to export goods which were already inside the firm’s containers, the ministry asked businesses to get back the goods as soon as possible and contact their foreign partners to find ways to change to other shipping firms and to organise the goods booking schedule.

Those batches of goods that had already been shipped, the businesses were told to keep in touch with the Hanjin representative office in Viet Nam to keep track of the itinerary and co-ordinate with their foreign partners to ensure the goods were received at the ports on time.

The ministry, in co-ordination with the Ministry of Transport, said it would direct the ports to support businesses to ship and receive goods to avoid affecting the businesses’ schedule and traffic congestion at the sea ports.

According to the Associated Press (AP), Hanjin, the world’s seventh-largest container shipping company, filed for bankruptcy protection on August 31 and stopped accepting new cargo. With its assets being frozen, ships from China to Canada were refused to offload or take aboard containers because there were no guarantees that tugboat pilots or stevedores would be paid. This also led to a rise in shipping rates and could also hurt some trucking firms with contracts to pick up goods from Hanjin ships.

The South Korean giant represents nearly 8 per cent of the Trans-Pacific trade volume for the US market. While some retailers may already be hit with their merchandise for the holiday season getting delayed, experts say it is important for the issue to be resolved before the critical shipping month of October.

Regarding the bankruptcy of Hanjin Trần Thanh Hải deputy head of Import-Export Department of the Ministry of Industry and Trade (MIC) said the ministry has worked with authorised agencies to assist Vietnamese exporters after Hanjin Shipping Global stops operations in Viet Nam.

Hai said Hanjin accounted for 5 per cent of logistics market in Việt Nam. Therefore, industries with large volume of export such as garment, footwear, timber or fisheries would be affected by the bankruptcy.

To solve this problem, the Ministry of Industry and Trade announced on its website for those who have to change their shippers. The ministry will work with Ministry of Transport and port authorities to offer inventive for containers influenced by the bankruptcy

Nguyễn Việt Hòa, CEO of Vietnam Container Corporation (Viconship) said the impact to Viconship was negligible. Hanjin just entered the Viconship’s Green Port for the last 3 to 4 months.

Hòa said in the last four months, Hanjin maintained only one ship every week and made a contribution of around 3 per cent and 5 per cent of revenue.

Currently, Hanjin owes a debt of about US$100,000 to Viconship. However, Viconship was holding 500 to 700 containers worth more than $1 million.

Đỗ Văn Minh, General Director of Gemadept JSC said his company did not suffer from the "incident" of Hanjin. At the moment, Gemadept did not work with this container shipping company.

In Việt Nam, Hanjin is the first container shipping company invested in domestic port market. Hanjin contributed its capital to Tân Cảng – Cái Mép International Terminal Joint Venture. Tân Cảng – Cái Mép International Terminal is a joint venture by Saigon Newport Company and 3 foreign partners including Hanjin Shipping Line (Korea), MOL (Japan) and Wanhai Line (Taiwan). VNS