Containership fleet outpaces port development

By the end of 2015 the world’s fully cellular containership fleet consisted of approximately 5,200 vessels with an aggregate capacity of 19.8m teu.

Drewry’s latest maritime research revealed that last year saw the largest ever influx of capacity as the cellular fleet swelled by around net 1.55m teu, eclipsing the 1.35 million teu added in 2006.

A slowdown in the rate of scrapping of older vessels from 380,000 teu in 2014 to only 150,000 teu in 2015, also helped set the new record.

The cellular fleet increased by 8.5% in 2015, this was the fourth in a row when fleet growth outpaced that of world port throughput and worryingly for carriers the difference between the two was the worst this century, apart from 2009.

The latest Container Forecaster, recently published at the end of December by Drewry, indicated that there was a 7% point gap between supply and demand growth last year, versus margins of between