Hapag Lloyd has cancelled services to control costs -CEO

FRANKFURT (Reuters) – The chief executive of Hapag-Lloyd, the world’s number five container line, on Thursday said the company has cut services on key global routes in order to rein in costs amid a decline in freight rates that weighed on its nine-month profits.

“We are taking measures to reduce capacities in order to control our costs,” said CEO Rolf Habben Jansen in an interview with Reuters.

“We have cut one of five (South East Asia) sailings to North Europe and have taken out one of six services to East Coast United States,” he said, adding that cuts in staff numbers, as announced recently by competitor Maersk, were not currently on the agenda.

(Reporting by Vera Eckert and Elke Ahlswede, editing by Miranda Murray)