The decision by  NYK Line (Nippon Yusen Kaisha) to move calls from the port of Seattle to nearby Tacoma has been meet with dismay by some Seattle port officials.

They said the port of Tacoma had “snatched away” one of Seattle's oldest container shipping customers by agreeing to build a $300 million terminal for NYK Line.

Some officials said the new terminal agreement had inflicted “a very serious blow to the relationship between Seattle and Tacoma” while others termed it “another case of Tacoma expanding at Seattle's expense.”

The new terminal, the most expensive the port has ever built, will be on the industrial east side of Tacoma's Blair Waterway.

Designed to handle between 1.4 million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs) and 1.8 million TEUs per year, the terminal is scheduled to open in 2012.

NYK Line's ships currently call at SSA Marine's port of Seattle but NYK Line does not have its own terminal there.

NYK Line, a customer at Seattle for more than a century, currently ships container cargo through Seattle's Terminal 18.

Reports said Seattle's disappointment was that NYK was leaving despite the port's completion of a $300 million terminal expansion five years ago.

Reports said the main reason for NYK's move was that it was keen to operate its own terminal.

“For many years we've considered it a strategic imperative to have a terminal in the Pacific Northwest,” said Peter Keller, president of NYK Line North America. “Tacoma has that ability.”

Tacoma port executive director Timothy Farrell said he didn't see NYK Line's move to Tacoma as stealing business from Seattle, rather as keeping a company in the US Northwest.

“Seattle didn't have land to offer for a terminal and we wouldn't want them to move to Vancouver,” he said.