From SCDigest's On-Target e-Magazine
- Nov. 20, 2012 -
Global Logistics News: What's Happening in Global Shipping Capacity
Record TEU Deliveries for 2013, but Capacity Growth is Slowing; Good News for Shippers, no Matter How You Slice It
SCDigest Editorial Staff
What's happening in terms of supply and demand in the global container shipping industry? It depends whose numbers you use. We'll try to sort it out in this article.
First, the global shipping broker Braemar Seascope's most recent Quarterly Container Ship Fleet Statistics report predicts that 2013 likely will be the biggest year ever for container ship deliveries.
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As of September 24, 550,000 TEU, or 3.4% of the fleet, stood idle. That is up almost 31% from around 420,000 idle TEU in May.
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What Do You Say?
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Braemar estimates that about 1.7 million TEU's worth of capacity is scheduled to be delivered during 2013. That would be up from the roughly 1.3 million TEU that it expects to be delivered in 2012. (See chart below). That would represent growth in raw deliveries of about 30%.
The biggest year previously for deliveries was 2008, when capacity of 1.5 million TEU was delivered to the industry.
Many ships will be taken out of service, however, meaning total capacity in the sector should rise about 9.5% in 2013, Braemar predicts. That will almost certainly be greater than the growth in container volumes, as the IMF and others are predicting global trade growth will be lower than overall global GDP growth of about 3% in 2013.
In the Pacific, the US West Coast-bound container volumes have grown by just 1.2% in the first eight months of the year, and saw a year over year drop in volumes in July and August. Should the slowdown continue for the rest of the year, estimated annualized growth will then end up at just 0.7%. Of course, export shipments into financially challenged Euro Zone have dropped dramatically over the past couple of years.
In this almost post-Panamax era, very large capacity ships will make up much of that new TEU supply, Braemar's research also finds.
Braemar says 48 ships will be delivered in 2013 that have capacity of 10,000 TEU or greater, and that in total will inject 650,000 TEU into the market. It says that annual deliveries of ships in excess of 10,000 TEU will average at about 50 units per year between 2011 and 2014.
Jonathan Roach, Braemar Seascope's container analyst says that "With fleet management at the forefront of ship manager's minds, supply growth this year has been actively countered with plenty of demolition. During the first three quarters of 2012, containership demolition reached in excess of 220,000 TEU and we estimate by the end of the year the TEU capacity scrapped will reach the 300,000 TEU level."
Source: Braemar Seascope
He said that represents the equivalent of approximately 2% of the global fleet at the start of 2012, but that is obviously still well below new capacity coming into the market, which means continued good news for shippers, who remain well in control of the supply-demand balance.
Some slightly different numbers were recently released from the Baltic and International Maritime Council (BIMCO).
It recently published research saying that growth in global shipping capacity is slowing, predicting that capacity will grow about 7% in 2013. That would put its forecast about 2.5 percentage points below that from Braemar.
(Global Supply Chain Article Continued Below)
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