Introduction of container ships ③ Top 20 shipping company rankings, tonnage capacity by shipping company, centering on the trend of large size

Introducing the final chapter of the container ship overview. In this chapter, we will focus on the ranking of container shipping companies, the capacity of each shipping company, and the trend of large-scale.

 

 

1.    Ranking of Top 20 shipping companies

 

https://alphaliner.axsmarine.com/PublicTop100/

 

This is a ranking by container ship that can be viewed for free on Alphaliner. If you enter the link above, you can see the top 100 by ship.

One thing that stands out is the aggressive strategy of MSC, the No. 1 shipping company. Although it is already ranked first in the world with 4.6 million TEU in terms of total fleet capacity, it will have an operating fleet of more than 6.4 million TEU when all of these vessels are acquired, with only 1.8 million TEU remaining in orders.

 

While Maersk, the second-largest shipping company, has only about 8% of the total tonnage, MSC has a 39% remaining order, showing that the two shipping companies have very different strategies.

I wonder if the opposite strategies of these two shipping companies led to the dissolution of 2M.

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 2.    Average tonnage by shipping line

This figure shows the total capacity of each vessel (owned + chartered) divided by the number of vessels per vessel. Roughly, it is possible to estimate the size of ships operated by each shipping company.

As you can see,

• 1) The size per chuck of HMM is approaching about 11,000 TEU. After Hanjin Shipping's bankruptcy and Hyundai Merchant Marine's financial improvement, HMM placed orders and operated mainly for large vessels.
• 2) From ZIM, the top 10 shipping company, to the top 20 shipping company, it can be confirmed that all of them operate fleets focusing on small ships. Excluding IRISL, they are operating a fleet of less than 4,000 TEU per vessel, which means operation mainly in the Asian region and feeder vessels.

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3.    Container ship capacity trend

This is the current status of container ship fleets around the world. The blue bar graph is the total capacity of container ships by year (unit: thousand TEU), and the orange line is the yearly increase (%).

 

Looking at the growth rate, it recorded an all-time high supply growth rate of 16.4% in 2006, and only increased by 1.3% in 2016 amid sluggish market conditions. The rate of increase (%) is also important, but the total fleet size has already increased eightfold from 3.3 million TEU in 1996 to 27 million TEU in 2023.

These days, the article on the issue of delivering ships that comes out every day is becoming a problem because it increases to 6.7% in 2023 and 5.5% in 2024 amid such an absolutely increased volume.

 

Amid a rapid increase in supply, the SCFI freight rate index, which has an inverse relationship, moved in the opposite direction. I think you can refer to the SCFI movement in the last article.

 

Comparison of Representative Ocean Freight Index Characteristics (tistory.com)

Comparison of Representative Ocean Freight Index Characteristics

 

For this reason, the market situation itself seems to be sluggish this year and next year amid record-high container deliveries and growth rates.

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4.     Megaship trend

In order to enjoy the economy of scale from the perspective of shipping companies, orders for container ships are increasing. Looking at the figure above, the first 17,000TEU or larger container ships were delivered in September 2006, and the number gradually increased from 2014. 15,000TEU class vessels, called Neo Panamax class, can pass through the expanded new Panama Canal, but post-Panamax vessels of 17,000TEU class or higher cannot pass through the Panama Canal. Therefore, these post-panamax vessels are mainly deployed on European routes. This is because the European route has a longer route distance than the North American route, allowing greater economies of scale.

 

Finally, we would like to look at the number and size of container ships by size.

There are 4,637 vessels of less than 8,000 TEU, accounting for 43.7% of the total fleet. TEU per vessel is 2,424TEU, indicating that there are many small vessels.

Ships of 8,000 TEU or higher, which are heavily used in North America, account for 650 ships, or 23.7% of the tonnage. There are 346 neo-panamax-class vessels of 12,000 TEU or more, accounting for 18.8%, and 175 super-large vessels of 17,000 TEU or more, accounting for 13.9%.

 

In other words, the proportion of large ships over 12,000TEU class is about 33%, confirming that the fleet size is definitely getting larger. Amid the trend of competitively increasing the size of ships among shipping companies, even 23,964 TEU ships have been released, but there is a limit to the effect of economies of scale through further cost reduction for each transport unit, and this trend is expected to decline.

 

Thank you.