News
Congestion is and will remain a growing problem for the liner sector. Climate change resulting in extreme weather with typhoons, heavy rainfall, but also periods of excessive drought, is increasingly playing havoc with liner schedules.
On the port side, a widespread comment made by terminal operators is that the pressure on their facilities is amplified by the fact that call sizes on megamax ships have increased significantly over the past years.
Information on the exact call sizes is not publicly available as it is considered to be commercially sensitive. One can, however, get an idea of potential call sizes by dividing a service’s nominal capacity by the loop’s number of discharge ports.
Alphaliner has carried out this exercise for the Far East–North Europe westbound trade. The average vessel size per individual loop was divided by the number of westbound stops in Europe.
Evergreen Marine’s CEM service only makes three westbound calls with ships of an average size of 23,490 TEUs, resulting in 7,830 TEUs per port.
The Premier Alliance (Ocean Network Express, or ONE; HMM; and Yang Ming Marine Transport)’s FE3 loop, operated by HMM tonnage of 22,200 TEUs on average, discharges at three ports, resulting in theoretical call sizes of 7,400 TEUs per port. Four loops have only two or three North European ports of call, resulting in potential westbound volumes of 6,050 TEU per port. If the small South East Asia FE1 service, which is operated by relatively small ships of 8,600 to 9,600 TEUs, is excluded, the average volume per port would stand at 7,060 TEUs.
AIS-derived Hamburg berth data for July showed Evergreen ships alongside for 137 to 187 hours, HMM for 89 to 103 hours, and ONE for 98 to 111 hours. As for the Gemini Cooperation (Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd), which adopts a hub-and-spoke system, make four calls in Europe with four services, resulting in 4,700 TEUs per call. The same data indicted Maersk ships are at berth for 52 to 63 hours and Hapag-Lloyd for 37 to 55 hours.
