(NYSE: CP) will see the first vessel from vessel operator Maersk arriving into the Port of Vancouver in the first week of December instead of the original timeline of March 2021, a CP executive said Tuesday.

“We’re going to get a nice little boost from that business coming on early, and we’re quite excited by that,” said CP Chief Financial Officer John Brooks at the Scotiabank Transportation and Industrials Conference.

CP announced last month that it had secured a multiyear rail agreement with Maersk to move freight through the ports of Vancouver and Montreal. CP was initially scheduled to start moving Maersk’s dry and refrigerated cargo at the Ports of Vancouver and Montreal on March 1, 2021. 

CP also has an agreement with Maersk to build a transload and distribution facility that would service Maersk by shuttling the containers of Maersk’s customers to and from the ocean terminals at the Port of Vancouver. The new multicommodity transload facility would be an expansion of CP’s existing intermodal facility in Vancouver.

At the investor conference, Brooks described the new transload facility as the first new facility of its kind at the Port of Vancouver in years. The facility will help fulfill Maersk’s wish to become more integrated with its customer supply chain, Brooks said.

“This transload space allows Maersk to bring in import goods, turn their empty boxes much quicker back to Asia or whatever country they need to return them to. It allows them to fill their boxes right at our terminal with exports — whether it be plastics, lumber, bulk — or send them back empty. We’ll have the scale to be able to rail directly off the port into the terminal, into the transload both directions,” Brooks said.

He continued, “It allows CP and Maersk to partner with a whole different world of customers that neither of us are doing business with and loading 53-foot containers at the transload, shipping them out either to distribution centers or directly to stores across both Canada and the U.S.”

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