这一年,超预期

A year old, and exceeding expectations

自巴拿马运河新船闸开启以来,期待已久的跨太平洋航运网络已成功运行了一年。新船闸可以通过比原先大两倍的船舶。尽管大部分的行业观察人士都期待海上承运人利用新船闸慢慢扩大船舶尺寸,事实上,因为一些航线的运力过剩,班轮公司在通往美国东海岸的全水路航线上部署的船舶比预期的更大。

Vessels transiting the new Panama Canal are getting bigger, and faster than expected. The long-anticipated sea change in transPacific shipping networks is well underway a year after the Panama Canal opened its expanded lock system. The waterway's new locks are large enough to handle ships three times the size of its older locks. Although most industry observers expected ocean carriers to ramp up the size of ships using the new locks gradually, the lines are sending ships larger than predicted onto the all-water route to US East Coast ports, as larger container ships are cascaded off trade lanes that have too much capacity. In the 10 months after the opening of the new locks, the Port of Savannah experienced a 12 percent increase in the volume of containers passing through the canal and a 6 percent increase in overall volumes. 'The canal is driving that. There's no question,' Lynch said. The rapid increase in the size of ships calling at East Coast ports through the canal is illustrated by the capacity of two ships that called at Savannah, Charleston and Norfolk just last month. On May 24, the OOCL France, a 13,926-TEU container ship, set a size record as it transited the enlarged locks on a service from Asia to the US East Coast. That record came just a few weeks after the 13,902-TEU COSCO Development had set the previous record on May 2. Because the new locks can handle much bigger ships, the actual tonnage of ships transiting the waterway is now 10 times the number of vessel transits. In the eight months from Oct. 1, 2016 — the start of fiscal 2017 — through May 31, 2017, total vessel tonnage as measured in Panama Canal PC/UMS tons jumped 22.1 percent over the same period in fiscal 2016, while the number of transits grew just 2.3 percent. Canal revenue climbed by a hefty 12.5 percent in those eight months.