年中看市

Focus: a look at the market in the mid-year

今年以来,全球经济错综复杂,复苏疲弱,航运市场持续低迷,克拉克森认为航运业正经历金融危机以来最为困难的时期。IMF预测显示,2016年世界经济增长将大部分来自新兴市场和发展中经济体的增长,但各国的经济发展前景仍参差不齐,巴西和俄罗斯等一些大型新兴市场深陷衰退,中国和印度的增长情况虽大致符合预测,但贸易增长速度明显放缓。

Since this year, the global economic recovery is weak and the shipping market continues to weaken. Clarksons says shipping industry is experiencing the most difficult times since the financial crisis. The IMF forecasts, most of the world economic growth in 2016 will come from the emerging markets and developing economies, but the prospect of each countries' economic development remains patchy. Some big emerging markets such as Brazil and Russia are in deep recession, China's and India's growth is broadly in line with forecasts, but the slow trade growth significant. Unfavorable trend of population, low productivity growth rate and the legacy of the global financial crisis influence continue to hinder economic activities, making developed economies improve the rate of economic growth more effectively. Some countries and regions, the shadow of economic impact of these shocks and geopolitical conflict, political differences, terrorism, refugees, or global epidemic diseases related, if not contained, could have a significant negative effect on global economic activity. Thecurrent imbalance situation of shipping market between supply and demand is difficult to reverse, the international dry bulk and container transportation market is still mired in recession. Bulk market is difficult to have greater improvement in the third quarter, the traditional peak season of the fourth quarter might have mild rebound but growth is limited. Container market will usher in a small peak of the summer transport and might get improved slightly, but the contradiction of supply and demand is still severe. Demolition of containerships almost tripled in the first five months of 2016 in comparison to the same period of 2015. This illustrates the efforts carried out by shipowners to counter the fundamental imbalance between supply and demand under poor container shipping market conditions. However, more needs to be done to lift the charter market. The demolition of capacity in the panamax segment(3-5,999 TEUs), since the start of January 2016 till the year to date, has been especially significant. A total of 150,863 TEUs of panamax ships have been demolished so far in 2016, this equals the number of the same type of ship scrapped from June 2014 up to and including December 2015. One possible explanation behind the higher demolition in the panamax segment since January 2016 is their potential redundancy – due to the opening of the new locks of the Panama Canal on 26 June 2016. This will soon allow neo-panamax containerships with a maximum beam of 49 m to pass through. The new set of locks was inaugurated by COSCO Shipping Panama a ship with a capacity of 9,443 TEUs. More and larger ships are set to enter, as the new locks begin to operate with full capacity. Due to oversupply of container shipping capacity and ongoing lack of global demand, time charter rates for the panamax segment went down from the monthly average of USD 15,800 per day in March 2015 to a monthly average of USD 5,755 per day in July 2016(-63.5%). BIMCO's expectations remain as the oil product tanker fleet continues to grow with earnings at the lowest since Q3 in 2014. But there is still money to be made in the second half of 2016. The oil product tanker market has reached a net fleet growth of 4.3m DWT so far in 2016. That is well in line with BIMCO's full estimate of 8.5m DWT for the full year 2016. The main drivers of the total growth continue to be the MRs and LR2 s. With a net fleet growth of 5.8 % in 2015, the oil product tankers are looking to continue the trend of elevated supply growth with 3.0% growth so far in 2016 – for the full year BIMCO expects 6.0%. All four oil product tanker segments have experienced an overall decline in earnings in 2016, with the LR2 seeing a 54% decline from USD 33,966 per day from 1 January 2016 to USD 15,703 per day on 24 June 2016. The demand growth for global oil according to The International Energy Agency(IEA) is up by 1.4 million barrels per day(mb/d) year on year for Q1 2016, compared to the previous expected 1.2 mb/d. Furthermore, they expect the demand and supply for global oil to be in balance in Q3 2016.