Tonnage oversupply and a lagging growth in world trade demand are expected to keep shipping in the "red", despite a series of measures adopted by most ship owners, in order to alleviate the current imbalance between supply and demand. According to the latest weekly report from shipbroker Intemodal, the overcapacity problem isn't a new one, as it was accurately predicted since the middle of 2008, when the world orderbook had already soared to unprecedented heights. As a result, these projections have turned into a stark reality nowadays, as the number of newbuilding deliveries continue to increase. The question is how much more of this increasing capacity can the industry sustain and at which point will be the tipping point at which we start to see modern well maintained vessel heading for lay-up or the beaches of the Indian Sub-Continent?
According to Intermodal's Panos Makrinos, "the main issue here is that shipbuilding capacity is still well beyond any reasonable expectation of what the industry could possible require in terms of replacement demand over the upcoming fears. The solution which has been proposed by many over the past years has been two fold. Firstly that shipbuilding capacity has to be reduced significantly through shipping of operations by some shipbuilders (i.e. a switch towards ship repairs) or even closing of inefficient shipyards and berths altogether. Secondly is that demolition activity will have to be sustained for a little while longer at its current levels in order to provide a chance for recovery in the freight market. Both of these steps were ignored by several owners during the 2009-2010 period, who instead of easing off their further new ordering, increased it, while at the same time keeping demolition volume to a minimal. The combination of the two and particularly the former has accounted for much of the dragging out of the current shipping crisis" he said.
Makrinos added that "all this changed in 2011 and 2012, as things started to get considerably worse in terms of freight earnings for most shipping sectors, pulling down the curtains on wrongfully placed optimism and bringing many of these owners back to their senses. Newbuilding activity dropped to a bare minimum for both the tanker and dry bulk sectors, helping the orderbook decrease considerably as the record number of vessels being delivered were not being replaced by further new orders. At the same time, we started to see cancelling of existing orders as well as rescheduling of delivery dates, helping further contain the rate of growth in the fleet" he noted.
Of course, demolition activity played a key role as well. Intermodal's analyst stated that "the fast paced increase in demand for cheaper sources of steel by India and China helped revitalize the market while keeping offered prices more buoyant than one would have expected to see during a downturn of the shipping cycle. These high prices for scrap steel coupled with the rapidly dropping values for further trading vessels helped make the choice “easy” for most owners of older tonnage. It's an industry first to be able to sell an overage unit for scrap and use the money generated as 30% equity on a modern 5 year old vessel. It is points like this which allowed for a strong increase in demo activity.
This is all well and good but is the market and better off than it was 12 months ago? Is there a turn to be seen in market conditions within 2013? Although both the newbuilding and demolition markets have started to play an active role in reversing the poor market conditions, they only affect one side of the supply-demand equation. The needed demand in global seaborne trade is still not there and what's worse is that we have a very modern fleet which makes for an inflexible market and could push things towards the “last resort” option of laying up vessels as was done back in the 80's. Let's just hope it doesn't come to that. All that can be said for now is that we expect 2013 to be equally if not more difficult than 2010 for shipowners. High demolition activity and limited new-building ordering are the best hope of seeing a light at the end of the tunnel" Makrinos concluded.