News / Carriers still desperate for tonnage to guarantee emergency schedules

Photo: © Mr.siwabud Veerapaisarn | Dreamstime.com

Ocean carriers are struggling to maintain weekly sailings from Asia to Europe via the Cape of Good Hope routing, despite the delivery of some 425,000 teu of newbuild capacity this year.

According to an analysis by Alphaliner, the extended voyages are proving a challenge for carriers endeavouring to keep to revised proforma schedules.

“At least two, and preferably three, extra vessels need to be added to each loop to guarantee all scheduled departures,” said the consultant.

However, to plug the gaps in their networks, carriers have adopted a hybrid strategy of adding some extra vessels and speeding-up ships, supplemented by additional sailings with any size ship they can fix on the charter market.

No fewer than 16 13,200 teu to 16,600 teu newbuilds, and a 24,000 teu vessel, have been received by alliance carriers so far this year, but the influx of capacity has been insufficient to sustain the revised schedules.

Instead, Alphaliner noted, last month and this, carriers deployed extra loaders between Asia and Europe, mainly much smaller ships; for example, Hapag-Lloyd operated the 1,844 teu Kalliroe C and 2,713 teu Cape Sable as ad-hoc sailings outside THE Alliance network.

“For carriers, it is a lucky coincidence that the return of the first batch of diverted ships falls in the traditionally slow period after Chinese New Year, when shipping lines tend to blank a number of sailings,” said Alphaliner.

In its analysis, the consultant found that the Ocean Alliance had “faced the largest struggle” to find additional ships to shore-up its network, especially on services from Central China to the Mediterranean.

While, the 2M Alliance had been best able to cope with the extra requirement for tonnage, MSC and Maersk both benefiting from the delivery of a large number of newbuildings.

Meanwhile, as a consequence of carriers hunting down any open tonnage, Alphaliner’s fortnightly idle fleet report has recorded the lowest level of inactive container vessels in almost two years, at just 0.7% of the global fleet.

It follows that the containership charter market is, as one broker recently described to The Loadstar, “red hot”.

Daily hire rates for 12-month charters (shipowners are looking for at least a year’s employment) are trending upwards across all sectors, with the smaller sizes particularly in demand for feeding in the Mediterranean region.

Nevertheless, without the Red Sea crisis, both the current picture and outlook for liner shipping and containership owners would look decidedly different.

Indeed, Alphaliner gave a stark reminder of the underlying chronic overcapacity situation in the industry, fuelled by the ‘ordering frenzy’ whipped up by two years of pandemic-demand mega-profits by carriers.

It said: “While some carriers are now in the very comfortable position of adding many newbuildings to their fleets, the risk of overcapacity in the liner sector has absolutely not disappeared.

“Any solution in the short- or middle-term for the Red Sea conflict, would immediately result in many ships becoming redundant,” added Alphaliner.