Successful joint venture with New Zealand’s McCallum Bros and the project for a new multi-purpose vessel

A new vessel for Nova Marine — a truly multipurpose ship capable of transporting containers, fuel, vehicles, and livestock. All this nearly 20,000 kilometres away from the company’s operational base in Lugano.

The Nova Marine Carriers group, which in recent years has steadily diversified the presence of its fleet across the world’s seas — among other things, achieving global leadership in the cement transport market — is now expanding this diversification into Oceania.

It is doing so through a joint venture with a historic New Zealand company, McCallum Bros Ltd (MBL), taking on transport services from New Zealand to the Chatham Islands — geographically the farthest point in the world from Italy and Switzerland.

This multipurpose shuttle service will be handled by MBL/Nova Marine JV, the 50/50 joint venture set up in recent months between Nova Marine Carriers — the Lugano-based shipping group founded by Giovanni Romeo and today controlled by the Romeo and Gozzi families — and McCallum Bros Ltd, which for four generations has been engaged in coastal shipping across the South Pacific islands, as well as in towing services, beach replenishment, and sand transport for the construction sector.

The new joint venture won the tender (launched by the New Zealand Ministry of Transport, partly due to the aging of the over-40-year-old vessel Southern Tiare, currently operating these routes but increasingly unreliable in ensuring supplies for the islands) thanks to the design of this new vessel. The project, developed at the Lugano technical offices in collaboration with RINA, is tailored to meet the needs of the Chatham Islands communities, located about 800 km east of New Zealand. The vessel is expected to enter service in mid 2027.

It is estimated that the new ship will be able to transport up to 70,000 stock units per year, based on the minimum number of contracted voyages.

The proposal from the MBL/Nova Marine JV was chosen because the vessel and operational model presented the best solution to ensure a reliable, cost-effective, and long-term maritime service for the Chatham Islands over the next 20 years. It also offered the Government the best value for money.

“For some time now,” said Vincenzo Romeo, CEO of Nova Marine Carriers, “we have been planning to enter the New Zealand shipping space. We are expecting the arrival of one of our cement carriers to begin operating in New Zealand waters by the end of this year. Certainly, the joint venture with McCallum Bros marks, even psychologically, a turning point for our group: a turning point born from the conviction that to survive and grow in a market characterized by uncertainties — such as today’s global shipping industry — it is necessary to deploy maximum flexibility and accept challenges that until just a few years ago would have been unthinkable, reaffirming ourselves as a truly global and reliable brand.”

“We believe that our presence in the South Pacific, so far from ‘home’” he added, “also sends a signal of a company ready for new challenges, in a market for us without borders.”