Drewry: Containership capacity worries ‘overhyped’

Deferral of ship deliveries will improve supply-and-demand balance for liner companies.    Drewry said concerns about overcapacity in the container shipping industry this year are “overhyped.”
   The London-based consultant said in its Container Insight Weekly newsletter that the decision by some shipowners to defer ship deliveries means “containership deliveries in 2018 will not damage the supply-demand balance.
   “According to different commenters, 2018 is either going to bring a tsunami of new capacity that will drown the container market’s nascent recovery or newbuild deliveries will largely be manageable. The latter is Drewry’s opinion,” it added.
    There were concerns raised in October that ships with capacity of 1.8 million TEUs might be delivered this year. That included ships with delivery dates that were going to be postponed from 2017.
   Based on deliveries in the first quarter of this year, Drewry said it now “expects the full-year delivery total to be in the region of 1 million to 1.2 million TEUs. In essence, over the space of six months owners have pared back the 2018 total by as much as 600,000 TEUs.
   “Crucially, the new supply growth forecast for the current year is lower than demand, meaning we expect the global supply-demand index to nudge upwards this year. The market will still be over-supplied, but not catastrophically so and certainly showing signs of improvement,” Drewry said.
   But Drewry noted more than half of that capacity is expected to be delivered in the first half of the year.
   “The timing could not have been worse for carriers as it created negative sentiment for the crucial annual Asia-Europe and Transpacific contracting seasons,” it said.
   Looking ahead, Drewry said a much larger share of the ships on order are ultra-large container vessels (ULCVs) with capacity of more than 18,000 TEUs. They only accounted for about 5 percent of deliveries in 2013, while in 2017 and this year they account for a third of the capacity being delivered. And that percentage is expected to grow in 2019 and 2020.