Danish shipping company Maersk’s Saudi Arabian subsidiary will set up a logistics hub for petrochemical exporters at King Abdullah Port.

The company will develop a non-bonded warehouse providing a range of logistics services for chemical producers around the privately held port at King Abdullah Economic City on Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea coast.

The planned logistics hub will cater to those who already have access to the Danish company’s services such as “land-side movement of cargo, customs clearance and ocean logistics”, it said in a statement.

The Maersk hub will be within a two-kilometer radius of the terminal yard, next to the port’s customs inspection zone, which Maersk said would save exporters time.

Exporters also currently have to wait wait between 14 and 18 days between making a booking and loading chemicals on to a vessel, but this will be shortened to six to eight days, Maersk said. The new site is 200km away from the large chemicals manufacturing hub at the Yanbu refinery – about 150km closer than the Jeddah Islamic port currently used by many of them.

Maersk will invest in 100,000 square meters of warehousing space during the first two years of operations at the hub to meet estimated demand totaling one million metric tonnes of throughput from nearby chemicals suppliers.