We focused on this in the last issue; now we have reached the stage of confusion.<\/p>\n
Articles and letters in the press suggest that consolidation of services and more vessel sharing agreements in the container sector is tantamount to a declining market, rather than an attempt by carriers to find ways to reduce their operating costs in the face of the large financial losses that they face.<\/p>\n
Since the end of the conference era in Europe we have seen more vessel capacity management than ever before, followed by a steady stream of rate restorations. Some carriers are talking of breaking even in the last months of 2009 and expect 2010 to be the dawn of recovery. The severe pessimism that we heard in mid 2009 has evaporated. Capacity utilisation is well above 90% out of Asia on all trades as European and American importers re-stock in the face of a tentative return to the stores by the consumers.<\/p>\n
The capacity management has worked. We see it with full ships, cargo roll over and sharp increases in rates on most trade routes. Chinese ports are seeing strong growth and the North American ports are beginning to experience double digit growth from the trough of 12 months ago. European ports, once they finally announce their December-January figures will likely report good results.<\/p>\n
But will the industry continue to benefit from their current strategies or is it in danger of reverting back to old ways? We see some of the carriers that pulled out of the Asia-Europe trade announcing their return and companies that had one foot in the grave expanding services.<\/p>\n
Can the big carriers continue to manage their capacity in order to ensure their financial recovery, or will they be spooked into bringing ships back from lay up sooner than required? Let us hope that lessons have been learnt this time around. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The last two months have been interesting for economic analysts; data has been contradictory and has led to the lengthy debate on whether we are about to return into recession or are poised for solid growth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":7894,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[],"sponsor":[],"class_list":["post-7893","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-economist"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7893","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7893"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7893\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7895,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7893\/revisions\/7895"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7894"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7893"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7893"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7893"},{"taxonomy":"sponsor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sponsor?post=7893"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}