Evergreen to remove 31 older ships from fleet

Evergreen to remove 31 older ships from fleet       Evergreen Line is planning to remove 31 older ships from its fleet, but will maintain its current services through alliances, space sharing agreements, and other strategic partnerships.
      'There are 31 “G” and “GX” type containerships in the Evergreen Line fleet that will soon be withdrawn from service,' said Barbara Yeninas, a U.S. spokesperson the Taiwan-based company, the world's fourth-largest container carrier. 'Those still owned by Evergreen Group companies will be scrapped while the remainder will be redelivered back to their owners as the current charter periods end.”
      She confirmed a Reuters report on the decision to reduce the company’s fleet, which quoted an unnamed official Evergreen as saying the shipping industry was facing severe challenges due to the global financial crisis and the large number of new containership orders in recent years.
      Yeninas said the ships averaged about 25 years in age. The G ships have a capacities of 2,922 TEUs; the GX ships capacities of 3,753 TEUs. The G ships were originally deployed in the company's round-the- world services in the mid 1980s.
      Evergreen's decision illustrates how even container carriers that refrained from participating in the new ship construction craze are being buffeted by overall economic trends.
      Evergreen is alone among the large liner companies in having no container vessels on order, according to the information service AXS Alphaliner. Alphaliner said Evergreen has a fleet of 165 ships with
603,191 TEUs in capacity — 92 owned ships with 337,547 TEUs and 73 chartered ships with 265,644 TEUs.
      Alphaliner said the global container fleet capacity rose 13.2 percent in 2008 and it expected to grow at an annual average of 11.4 percent through 2011.