December 4th, 2025 – The Premier Alliance is expanding its mainline service connecting China and the U.S. East Coast, adding new port calls in Vietnam and Halifax as shifting Asian trade patterns drive widespread service realignments.
Ocean Network Express (ONE) announced Monday that the East Coast 2 (EC2) service — jointly operated with HMM and Yang Ming — will begin making eastbound calls at the Port of Cai Mep in Vietnam. This addition will replace the current call at China’s Port of Xiamen. The 13,154-TEU HMM Victory will make the service’s first Cai Mep call on December 22nd.
In another significant adjustment, the EC2 will reroute its return leg to Asia via the Cape of Good Hope instead of the Panama Canal. The revised outbound rotation adds Halifax as the final North American call before the service heads across the Atlantic, and a stop in Singapore has been added to the Asia-bound journey. These changes take effect with the Dec. 10 departure of the 10,055-TEU Hyundai Pluto from Halifax.
To balance the new rotation, the Premier Alliance will modify its EC1 westbound service to restore calls at Manzanillo, Mexico, and Busan, South Korea — ports that were previously part of the EC2. Additionally, the EC3 service out of Southeast Asia will eliminate its second Halifax call from its North American schedule.
The enhanced connectivity at Cai Mep underscores the rapid growth in Vietnam–U.S. trade. From January through August, U.S. imports from Vietnam totaled $122.6 billion, a 43% jump compared with the same period last year, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Cai Mep, part of Vietnam’s Vung Tau port cluster, handled 35,400 TEUs in containerized exports to the US during the third quarter of 2025, a 20% increase year over year, according to PIERS, a Journal of Commerce sister product within S&P Global.
Meanwhile, exports from Xiamen to the U.S. totaled 194,895 TEUs in the third quarter. Although this reflects a recovery from the second quarter’s 158,916 TEUs, the volume is still 15% below the level recorded in the third quarter of 2024.
