Idle times

   The global containership fleet capacity idled as of mid-March reached 913,000 TEUs, according to the liner analyst Alphaliner.
   That’s still far short of the 1.5 million TEUs in layup in early 2010, but significantly up from the beginning of 2012. But don’t expect the idle fleet to cross the 1 million TEU level over the next few months.
   The new Asia-Europe alliances will have fully ramped up their service networks by then, and new or returning transpacific services will gradually raise capacity levels on that trade, barring any service withdrawals.
   Alphaliner does forecast the global idled capacity level to rise in the second half of 2012, and even break past the 1 million-TEU barrier by the start of 2013. That projection is likely based on the number of large vessels due for delivery this year, and the fact that neither North America and (especially) Europe appears hungry enough for Asian-made goods to raise demand levels sufficiently to keep all these ships running.
   What’s interesting about the current idled level is that there are 18 units of between 8,000 and 13,000 TEUs (the so-called megaships) currently laid up, though Alphaliner notes many of these are only temporarily idled due to the widespread service changes many carriers are making at the moment.
   It’s hard to find a line among the top 20 container carriers that isn’t involved in some major change to its east-west service network over the March-April timeframe. It’s only slightly easier finding a line that made a profit in 2011.
   The desperation that typically kicks in after such poor financial years does seem to have come again. As of this writing, sizable rate increases on both the transpacific and Asia-Europe were sticking to a large extent. Maybe carriers aren’t getting all they had hoped for, but they’re at least getting rates moving in a forward direction.
   For shippers, that could mean a multiple whammy of rising ocean freight costs, hiking fuel costs, increasing raw material costs, and so-so demand growth. Despite the positive signals from the U.S. economy, it all seems so tenuous, doesn’t it? — Eric Johnson