Alphaliner: Follow the bouncing fleet

Alphaliner: Follow the bouncing fleet    The size of the idle containership fleet has fallen to 263 ships with 549,000 TEU capacity, down from a peak of 1.5 million TEU of idle capacity at the beginning of December 2009, Alphaliner said in its latest weekly newsletter.
   But idle tonnage is expected to climb in later summer and reach 1 million TEUs again by the end of the year, the shipping research organization said.
   The amount of idle tonnage has dropped rapidly over the past six months, Alphaliner said, both because of increased demand and “large scale adoption of extra-slow steaming which has absorbed 550,000 TEUs of extra vessel capacity, or about 4.1 percent of the world fleet.
   Alphaliner said 88 services are now extra-slow steaming. For example, it said the CKYH, Grand and New World alliances all announced plans to put transpacific services into extra-slow steaming mode, bringing the number of extra-slow steaming service in the Asia/U.S trades to 31 — 18 to the West Coast and 13 to the East Coast.