The vessel sharing agreement between Maersk Line and Mediterranean Shipping Company has announced they will reduce their capacity by downsizing on the Asia-Mediterranean and North Europe AE9/Condor loops.
Container carrier Maersk Line announced they are looking to improve the allocation capacity on the Asia to Europe trade lanes in conformity with the market demand. The average vessels size
on the Mediterranean route would go down from 9.500 teu to 6.500 teu only.
Uneconomic smaller vessels of this size have been cascaded out of the Asia-North Europe route to make way for a flood of ultra-large new building’s coming out of the ship yards.
“The change to meet both current and anticipated demands, would mainly impact the Mediterranean” Denmark’s Maersk Line stated. In this region the services are calling at Tangier and Barcelona.
In the North of Europe the vessels are scheduled to call in Le Havre, Antwerp and Felixtowe, and in Asia, Ningbo, Shanghai, Yantian and Chiwan in China and Tanjung Pelepas in Malaysia.
Indications however are showing there could be more schedule changes to be announced the coming weeks.
Is this the first sign of a reversal of the cascading strategy of the operators ? Not if the order book is anything to go by according as maritime specialist Alphaliner reported earlier this week. They concluded the top three container operators have a massive order book upto 1.5 million cellular container capacities, of which the main order are involving ULCVs of 13.000 and up.
