风云变幻的市场

Erasing shipping’scapa city glut

今明两年的运力过剩到2015年很可能转变为短缺。 随着集装箱船舶订单和融资逐渐，枯竭，2015年的舱位短缺近在眼前，托运人们要未雨绸缪了。

With container ship orders and financing drying up, it's not too early for shippers to prepare for the great space shortage of 2015. With all of the talk about the glut of vessel capacity hanging over the world's container trades, what you read next may come as a surprise: The excess capacity of this year and next could turn into a shortage by 2015. And that could be dire news for beneficial cargo owners and other shipping interests who already have seen their freight rates spike this year as carriers have effectively and strategically managed their way through a supply-demand imbalance. Behind the portent for the capacity crunch is a dearth of new orders from financially strapped carriers and vessel owners just as the traditional European bank sources to finance new ships have all but dried up. On the one hand, a capacity shortage and corresponding jump in freight rates would be good news for those carriers able to order the much bigger, increasingly fuel-efficient ships Asian shipyards are producing. On the other, carriers unable to finance new ships would be stuck with older vessels that burn more fuel and have much higher slot costs. And that, in turn, could be the spark that triggers the long-speculated next round of consolidation as larger, better-financed and lower-cost lines take over smaller, high-cost carriers. Container ships that were built more than 10 years ago account for more than a quarter of the existing fleet. That's not old in an industry that has historically held onto ships for at least 20 years to wring out every last nautical mile before sending them to the breakers. But fuel-efficiency technology has progressed so rapidly that even the 30 percent of the fleet comprised of 5- to 10-year-old ships have engines half as fuel-efficient as new ships.