Without a doubt, the past 2 years made the shipping industry one of the most profitable industries. In November 2021, liner veteran John McCown, founder of Blue Alpha Capital has published an in-depth analysis of the profits in the shipping industry. What happened in 2020-2021 was hard to anticipate prior to the pandemic. Based on his analysis, the $48.1bn in Q3 container shipping profits was almost 50% higher than total FANG profits and the 42.7% net income to revenue margin was almost three times higher.
Although the overall TEU capacity on the three major routes Trans-Atlantic, Trans-Pacific, and Feast-Europe has increased by 12% from April 2021 until today, with a 17% capacity increase on the Trans-Pacific route, it has proven not to be sufficient and container shortages continued to represent a challenge, causing delays in delivery around key dates like Black Friday and Christmas. This infographic, as well as the April, respectively, June updates, are made based on Alphaliner real-time fleet updates.
The top 10 shipping companies have increased their fleet by 1.1 million TEU in the past nine months and the total number of active ships has increased by 2%. Moreover, these shipping companies have orders placed for a supplementary capacity of 4.3 million TEU, which is the current capacity made available by the top-ranking shipping company, Maersk.
The Italian-Swiss international shipping line, Mediterranean Shipping Company, is aggressively increasing its shipping fleet. It has supplemented April 2021 capacity by 0.5 million TEU and has placed an additional order of 1 million TEU, aiming to still the 1st rank in the Top 10 Global Shipping Companies.
The shipping industry has unraveled its potential for junior as well as senior careers, considering the solid revenues comparable with those of BigTech companies. Its top players are continuously competing in dominating the waters on the main ocean routes in their attempt to fill the demand gap. The questions that remain are: How many of the new ships are green ships? If they are green ships, are the ports ready with the infrastructure?
More infographics can be found here.
