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THE
container shipping industry lost US$4.7
billion in 2012 on top of a loss of $5.97
billion in 2011, reports Alphaliner.
This
is in addition to the $20 billion loss during
the financial crisis of 2009. The industry
did rebound in 2010, however, the approximately
$13 billion profit in that one year alone
has easily been wiped out since.
Based
on the above figures we can see that the
industry is between $17 billion and $18
billion in the hole. These losses simply
cannot continue. There will surely be consequences
for the shipping lines going forward if
this does not change, and soon.
In
this publication we have raised the question
several times before on whether continued
losses will lead to consolidation in the
form of acquisitions. The answer at this
stage appears to be no, at least not in
any significant way.
However,
there is a more subtle form of consolidation
that we have not looked at to date. This
consolidation comes in the form of creeping
market shares, as the bigger companies become
bigger at the expense of the smaller ones.
This
is what we will look at today in Hong Kong
Shipping Gazette...
In
the below table we can see the fleet size
of the industry's 10 largest players from
the beginning of the expansion of container
shipping in the 19080s to the present day.
 click image
to enlarge
From
the above table it is clear that much has
changed in the past 33 years. In fact only
three carriers have maintained their top
10 position, in terms of active capacity,
over this time - Evergreen, Maersk Line
and APL. However, even two out of those
three companies, Maersk and APL, are very
different companies today from what they
were then after their various mergers and
acquisitions.
Interestingly
Hong Kong's OOCL was listed in the top 10
previously, but has since dropped out of
the rankings. Nevertheless, it has been
one of the most consistently profitable
shipping companies in the world over the
past few decades, regardless of the wider
economic situation of the market.
We
can also see that the world's second and
third largest shipping lines by capacity
today, MSC and CMA CGM, were nowhere to
be seen until 2001 after which time both
have grown tenfold - which is extraordinary
growth.
From
the 1980s through to today the world's containership
fleet, in terms of capacity, has grown almost
24 times over.
What
also has changed in the industry is the
size of the vessels deployed. We can see
in the below graph that in 1980 the average
vessel size for the top 10 shipping lines
in the world was 1,283 TEU. If we look even
closer to focus on the top five and top
three carriers as well the average vessel
size ranged from around 1,200 TEU to 1,500
TEU.
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