News / Carriers boost capacity to meet growing demand on Africa trades

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As reported by The Loadstar yesterday, Africa is “by far” one of the fastest-growing markets, together with the Middle East and South Asia.  

It is no secret that import demand from Sub-Saharan Africa has surged this year as major export markets sought other channels to support the decline in demand from the largest consumer nation, the US. 

In CTS’ latest teu liftings data for October, it highlighted that Sub-Saharan African imports were up 16% year to date, driven mainly by “strong cargo flows” from the Far East, Indian Sub-Continent & Middle East and, “surprisingly”, North America. 

And, according to Alphaliner’s analysis this week, carriers have been more than willing to meet that demand.  

It found that, of the 7.3% of the global container fleet growth seen over the past 12 months, equating to 2.27m additional teu, 575,410 teu was deployed on liner services to and from Sub-Saharan Africa.  

Graph: Alphaliner

“The main conclusion of our latest global fleet deployment survey is that Africa and Middle East/India Subcontinent are now by far the fastest-growing markets. For Africa-related services, the impressive 27.3% capacity growth is clearly related to the Asia-Africa segment,” said the analyst  

Its data indicate that the fleet deployed between Asia and West Africa alone last month reached 1.32m teu, which reflected a rise of 494,800 teu, 60% more than in November last year. 

And when adding South-east Asia to East & South Africa capacity, the trade accounted for capacity of nearly 2.2m teu, which was up from 1.4m teu a year ago, and represented a 54.3% increase. 

According to Alpahaliner, a large proportion of this growth can be attributed to MSC. The world’s largest carrier switched its fleet of 14,000 to 16,000 teu vessels on its Asia-West Africa Africa Express service in February for 24,000 teu megamax ships. 

In a recent interview with The Loadstar Podcast, Mohammed Akoojee, CEO & MD of DP World Sub-Saharan Africa, said DP World was currently working to develop and expand its East African terminals, including a $200m investment to deepen the berth in Maputu, so it can facilitate similar larger vessels. 

“It is important, because East Africa is very well connected to markets in the Middle East, India, and Asia,” he said. “We’d like Maputo to be a hub for that part of Africa into Zimbabwe, into South Africa, and into also Zambia. And we’re deepening and lengthening the berth to allow bigger vessels to come into a market like Mozambique,” Mr Akoojee explained.  

But it isn’t just the Asia-Africa trade that saw growth, the analyst noted, capacity on the Europe- West Africa trade in November was up some 29,800 teu, or 9.6%, from the year before, to stand at 338,760 teu. 

“All Sub-Sahara-related African services now account for 8.1% of the overall world container fleet, 2.68m teu,” said Alphaliner.