Icelandic shipping company Eimskip will start weekly container ship service to Portland in December, hitting a goal the company set when it chose Maine for its North American headquarters almost five years ago.
Eimskip plans to increase trips to the International Marine Terminal in Portland by 45 percent, from 36 to 52 calls a year.
The new schedule coincides with upgrades at the terminal and increasing customer demand for more frequent container service.
“The businesses we have been dealing with need the weekly service,” Larus Isfeld, Eimskip’s director of Eimskip USA, said in an interview Monday.
“They all have weekly inventory and sales cycles, it is difficult to work with them if we don’t have weekly service. It is going to be very important for them, and for us, to get to that level.”
Eimskip’s traffic through Portland has grown every year since it started bi-weekly service to the city in 2013, the company said Monday. When it moved to Maine, the company set a goal of weekly shipments by 2020.