From Offshore Energy, February 1:
The unexpected demand recovery in the container shipping sector driven primarily by the US-based demand surge has seen the charter market depleted of available capacity.
Furthermore, the demand upturn has lead to increasing delays and heavy port congestion. impacting schedule reliability.
“Labor shortages and work interruptions in certain ports and various inland bottlenecks exacerbate the situation. As a consequence of this ships are waiting in line significantly longer than normal in Asian, North American and also in some other ports, leading to vessels being days and in many cases more than a week behind their normal schedule,” CEO of Hapag-Lloyd Rolf Habben Jensen said commenting on the market situation.
“In past years we have always been able to react to congestion by adding recovery vessels to ensure that we continued to offer a weekly service, however as our fleets are fully deployed and stretched beyond capacity this is regretfully currently only possible to a limited extent....
....MUCH MORE
That may explain why Hapag-Lloyd felt comfortable going ahead with their billion-dollar order for six 23,500 TEU mega-boxships.
