By Mike Wackett, The Loadstar

Maersk Line’s resolution final week to lay-up one among its 18,000 teu flagships is “good news for the industry”, Drewry Maritime Advisors stated earlier this week.

Other ocean carriers are prone to comply with the market chief and mothball extra surplus ships.

The transfer to idle the Triple-E vessel adopted a revenue warning from the Maersk group which lowered its full-year revenue forecast for the container division by $600m to “around $1.6bn. It blamed freight rates which “significantly deteriorated”, particularly on its most important Asia-Europe route within the latter a part of September and into October.

SEE ALSO: Maersk Line to Cut 4,000 Jobs

The dramatic turnaround from the Danish service was affirmation that, regardless of its capacity lately to outperform it friends by way of working margins, it’s not resistant to the poisonous mixture of an excessive amount of capability chasing dwindling cargo demand.

Drewry stated Maersk Line’s woes have been a “wake up call” for the business – it might need superior economies of scale, however there isn’t any further ‘silver bullet’ to guard it from the worsening buying and selling circumstances.

Without taking steps to mitigate the influence of the downturn, Maersk will bleed like different carriers, stated Drewry, including that it was solely 4 years in the past that it posted two consecutive quarterly losses of $600m.

These losses prompted a radical restructure at Maersk Line and there’s hypothesis that on the group’s third quarter outcomes presentation, scheduled for this Friday, there could possibly be bulletins of additional cuts to providers, a cancellation of newbuilding choices and, presumably, redundancies.

At the revenue warning on October 23, Maersk Group chief govt Nils Andersen wouldn’t touch upon attainable cures, however confirmed that the container division’s chief govt, Soren Skou, would even be current for the third-quarter outcomes presentation.

Elsewhere within the business, Q3 outcomes posted to date – the $96m internet loss reported by NOL on Friday and mixed $426m loss from Chinese carriers Cosco and CSCL – illustrate the injury to the carriers’ backside traces by the sub-economic freight atmosphere.

Drewry stated: “Carriers have thus far been able to stay in the black, despite rapidly decreasing freight rates, because they have managed to cut costs even harder, but the extent of the pricing decline seen recently will exceed any cost savings and tip many carriers towards the red zone, some quicker than others.”

One attainable mild on the finish of the tunnel for carriers plying the Asia-Europe lanes arrived on Friday when container spot charges inside the SCFI mirrored the newest spherical of common price will increase, carried out yesterday, leaping simply over $750 per teu on the week earlier than.

Meanwhile, the business malaise has severely dented Hapag-Lloyd’s IPO prospects, obliging the German service to low cost the worth vary of its provide and promote extra shares to make sure there will probably be a full take-up when the prolonged subscription interval ends tomorrow.

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