By Mike Wackett,

(The Loadstar) – Idled world container capability has reached a document excessive of 1.57m teu, based on the newest knowledge from Alphaliner.

And one-third of the laid-up tonnage consists of unemployed containerships of seven,500-19,000 teu.

The 352 laid-up ships, as of 11 March, account for 7.8% of the worldwide container vessel fleet – a quantity anticipated to develop with 1.25m teu of capability scheduled for supply this 12 months.

After deductions for vessel scrapping, Alphaliner calculates that the newbuildings will add a full-year fleet development of 4.3%. This compares with estimated demand development of simply 1.8%.

Continued weak point on the Asia-Europe, Asia-Latin America and Asia-West Africa trades has left container traces with quite a lot of redundant ships.

Alphaliner famous that some 30 ships of 9,000-14,000 teu had turn out to be surplus following the axing of a collection of Asia-North Europe loops by the 4 east-west alliance teams, with the newest community rationalisation introduced by the CKYHE alliance this morning.

Owners have two lay-up choices – scorching or chilly. In the case of the previous, the vessel will wait at anchor however stay totally crewed and capable of be redeployed nearly instantly. Vessels in chilly lay-up retain a skeleton crew and solely run important methods. These may take as much as three months to reactivate, and nonetheless includes important prices.

As a end result, ocean carriers look first to see if they’ll cascade surplus ships onto different trades while additionally off-hiring any chartered smaller tonnage deployed on smaller routes as early as potential.

“Carriers are starting to shift their surplus ships out of these (weak) sectors, creating havoc on other trades,” stated Alphaliner.

Meanwhile, persevering with low bunker gas prices have inspired carriers to divert some ships across the Cape of Good Hope, as an alternative of by means of the Suez and Panama canals, thus saving on canal transit tolls and absorbing round 100,000 teu of vessel capability throughout 12 liner providers, estimated Alphaliner.

Unsurprisingly, the overcapacity disaster has put additional stress on constitution charges and obliged containership homeowners to instruct brokers to be versatile with phrases and situations, together with providing free positioning.

And based on London-headquartered shipbroker Braemar ACM, few ocean carriers are ready to place any agency intervals on charters in sectors the place there’s an considerable alternative of ships. It stated that “flexi-period” phrases, with solely the day by day rent mounted was now regular with most liner firms.

The constitution market is experiencing “further misery”, stated Alphaliner, and would “remain in the doldrums” so long as the supply-demand hole remained.

Meanwhile, current fixtures reveal how far constitution charges for bigger vessels have plummeted.

Hapag-Lloyd was recorded fixing an 8,000 teu ship just lately for 2 months buying and selling between Asia and the west coast of South America at simply $8,000 per day with versatile choices.

While the overcapacity disaster within the bigger sizes is constant to pull down day by day rent charges to new lows, the dearth of newbuilds lately of the feeder sizes has saved the sector comparatively wholesome, offering a silver lining for hard-pressed containership homeowners.

Hamburg Sud just lately mounted a 1,100 teu ship for 16-18 months to deploy on its US west coast to South Pacific service at $9,600 per day.

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