‘Potential feeder containership shortage’ in Mediterranean

MSI said that newbuilding contracting by owners who operate in the Mediterranean will need to increase in the coming years as environmental regulations tighten. Environmental regulations threaten supply by making some vessels less commercially viable and pushing them to the scrapyard, while forcing others to reduce speed, effectively cutting supply.

“Containership deployment trends in the coming years will not only be impacted by the reinvigorated containership cascade, but also increasingly by the effects of fleet ageing and the fallout from new environmental regulations,” said MSI Containership Analyst Daniel Richards. “How this impacts different sub-regional container markets will depend in part on how the existing age profile of vessels deployed on each trade stands.”

The Mediterranean could end up with short supply of vessels to serve the spoke connections in its transhipment-heavy market unless operators start placing newbuild orders, warned MSI.

While the current overall containership orderbook is swollen with orders after a bumper two years for the sector, MSI’s analysis of smaller vessels under 3,900 teu capacity found a potential issue; over half of those ships are highly likely to be deployed on intra-Asia services.

Average sailing speeds have fallen from their 2021 peaks, particularly for smaller feeder vessels, said MSI, as demand and congestion eased, and rising bunker prices tipped the economic scales.

Related:Container shipping set for ‘short, sharp, hard landing’

“This potential for a shortage of vessels available to provide transhipment connections in the Mediterranean could also be exacerbated by changes in vessel sailing speeds in the years ahead,” added Richards. “There is a huge amount of uncertainty about how average sailing speeds will change in response to changes in environmental regulations, with potentially significant implications for industry market balances.”

The observations were part of the consultancy’s Q3 Containerships sector report titled “A Spot of Bother”.