Top container carriers’ active capacity down

It says that capacity management has become the key to restoring the industry to profitability in 2010.

Although the total operated fleet of the top 20 carriers increased by 1.6% since 2009 based on the carrier capacity rankings released by Alphaliner on 1 January 2010, the effective capacity dropped due to an increase in the idle fleet.

The combined capacity of the top 20 carriers reached 10.81 Mteu on 1 January 2010 compared to 10.63 Mteu in 2009. The idled capacity of these carriers currently stands at 743,000 teu, representing 6.9% of the carriers’ operated fleet. The idle capacity for these carriers was 328,000 teu or 3.1% of their fleet on 1 January 2009.

There were no new entrants to the top 20 list although, as a group, their share of the overall liner capacity fell marginally from 81.6% of the global capacity to 79.2%.

Maersk retained its overall lead in the carrier rankings, despite losing some market share from 15.6% to 15.0%. Seven of the carriers (APL, Hanjin, K Line, CSAV, Zim, HMM and UASC) gained market share based on total capacity operated, while two retained the same share (CMA CGM and YML) and the remaining 11 carriers lost market share.

Carriers that gained share however were largely left with surplus tonnage as there were limited deployment options as demand remains depressed for most parts of last year and practically all trades were unprofitable.

Capacity management will remain key to the carriers’ bid to return to profitability in 2010. The industry was badly affected by the over-capacity problem in 2009 as carriers were unable to reduce capacity quickly enough as demand fell. The problem was exacerbated by the heavy commitment on new ships made by the carriers in 2007-8.

The orderbook of the top 20 carriers remain high at 35% of their existing operated fleet. Apart from Evergreen which is in the fortunate position of having no ships on order, all the other main carriers have significant commitments on new ships, with the orderbook percentage exceeding 50% for quite a few carriers including COSCO, Zim, UASC and Hanjin.

Some of the orders have been pushed back to 2013-2014 although a large part of the capacity is still due to be delivered in 2010-2011. In capacity terms, MSC and CMA CGM have the largest orderbook at 556,000 teu and 497,000 teu respectively, with a large part of the new capacity due in the next two years.