Ray of light for North Europe ports

It said that the establishment of the Ocean and THE alliances in 2017 is likely to only have a limited effect based on the announced schedules.

Drewry’s Ports and Terminals Insight report stated: “The aggregate number of loops in the Asia–North Europe and North Atlantic trades remains unchanged, and individual ports will see no major change to the number of loops calling, and therefore this is a marked contrast to the changes seen during 2016 though.”

“Looking at the East-West services calling at North European ports, the North Atlantic and Asia-North Europe trades are dominated by services operated by the liner alliances”

The reported showed the changes in the number of loops over the last 12 months, distinguishing between the alliance and non-alliance services.

There has been a 10% drop in the number of east-west loops, with those removed all being operated by the alliances. Two out of nine weekly loops have been removed from the North Atlantic trade and three out of 18 loops were removed in the Asia-North Europe trade.

Despite this, the average vessel sizes have increased only slightly, this shows that that the alliances have used the reduction in the number of loops as part of an effort to reduce overall ship capacity, so to match it more closely to demand.

Drewry said: “The total number of loops per week remains unchanged at eleven Asia–North Europe loops and seven North Atlantic loops, and several ports see no change in their number of weekly calls. Interestingly one call is reintroduced at Zeebrugge, after the earlier cancellation (by O3) of both their calls at the port.”

“It is surprising, and can only reflect that the lines involved have found negative cost and/or competitive consequences of dropping the calls. Omitting Zeebrugge, for example, might have required some lines to absorb some inland transport costs, plus shippers located in or close to Zeebrugge would have been impacted.”

Ports will not have to cope with fewer port calls and larger box exchanges because as the number of alliances reduces, some rationalisation of port calls might be expected as most lines will have access to an increased number of loops.

This port call rationalisation is not happening with the 71 current loop port calls per week reducing only to 70 per week for the new alliances.

The report made it clear that although it believes the trend towards lower frequency and larger ships may be on its way out, ports are not out of the wood yet.