Steady as She Goes
Ahead of the Panama Canal expansion two alliances have announced they will upsize some of their ships on the Asia-US East Coast route. How quickly will the others follow? Drewry Maritime Research takes a look:
The 9,400-teu Cosco containership Andronikos will make the first transit of the expanded Panama Canal on Sunday 26 June, and ahead of that two shipping alliances – CKHYE and G6 – have laid out their plans to upgrade the size of ships used on the Asia-US East Coast via Panama route.
In November last year Container Insight Weekly noted that Drewry expected carriers to resist the urge to flood the trade with the biggest ships possible and that vessel upgrades will be incremental and in line with demand growth.
That prediction seems to have come true based on the immediate plans that have been communicated thus far.
The G6 Alliance will have the biggest ships on the trade from July when its new NYX service will deploy 10 units of 10,000 teu.
However, the NYX service will replace two existing loops (NCE and the NYE/SCE Combo) that use ships of half that size, meaning the net increase in weekly nominal capacity will be negligible.
The CKYHE Alliance will make the biggest strides in capacity as it will upgrade three existing Panama services up to a maximum of 8,500 teu, as well as re-routing a Suez service through Panama. Mitigating things the alliance will suspend one service (AWE2) using 4,500 teu ships.
All told, the forthcoming changes will increase CKYHE’s nominal capacity by nearly 14,000 teu a week.
