Container shipping in crisis

Jerzy Kujawa

Summary
In the last two years, the global maritime trade, and in particular container throughput, has been growing, although more slowly than in the exceptional year 2010, after a rapid collapse in 2009. Container fleet has also been growing well, but financial results achieved by the majority of leading container carrier companies (TOP 20) are very bad. When in 2009 their losses amounted to several billions dollars, carriers explained that it was an exceptional year because of the economic crisis and unusual collapse of container throughput accompanied by increasing expenses (especially on fuel). However, looking at financial results for the four years period of 2008-2011, year 2010 appears to be exceptionally profitable and the sum of financial results for the entire period for fifteen carriers from the TOP 20 group is 5.5 billion dollars loss. Debt of carriers is already over 90 billion dollars. Many of them are actually on the verge of bankruptcy and the prospects are not the best.

Container shipping in crisis

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