Stockholm, Sweden-based Wallenius Wilhelmsen Logistics has been awarded a five-year contract from Jaguar Land Rover to ship the automaker's Jaguar and Land Rover vehicles from the United Kingdom to seven international port facilities including California's Port of Hueneme.
Under the terms of the deal, Wallenius Wilhelmsen will handle close to 45,000 vehicles for the automaker this year, providing terminal services at the British port of Southampton and shipment to the seven ports, which include: Baltimore, Md.; Brunswick, Ga.; Port Hueneme; Halifax and Fremantle in Canada; Melbourne and Port Kembla in Australia; and Auckland in New Zealand.
Financial terms of the deal were not released.
Wallenius Wilhelmsen, which has worked with the automaker since the 1980s, will also use space charted on ACL vessels to ship Land Rover Freelander models from Liverpool, close to Jaguar Land Rover's Halewood manufacturing plant, to the Port of Baltimore in the US.
Pre-delivery and inspection work of vehicles will be performed by Wallenius Wilhelmsen at its vehicle processing center in Brunswick for Jaguar and Land Rover models destined for the US East Coast and at Port Hueneme for vehicles headed for US West Coast markets.
Until roughly 15 years ago, most car imports on the southern US West Coast were handled through the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles. However, as the two ports began refocusing the majority of their space on container terminals, niche ports like Hueneme and San Diego have moved in to capture a sizable portion of the automobile import market for the region.
