AXS-Alphaliner, the industry reference in liner shipping and a division of AXSMarine, announced the publication of the first of a new series of surveys on container trades, commenting and completing the dynamic information available in the AXS-Alphaliner website.
This first survey covers the intra Med container trades, including Black Sea and Adriatic Sea. It provides an exhaustive list of some 150 services offered by the 38 carriers covering these trades.
Intra Med container trades are enjoying a boom, largely explained by the emergence of the Black Sea economies and the increased trade generated by Near East countries and by Maghreb. This boom has fuelled development of intra regional services and feeder services.
The new AXS-Alphaliner survey details recent historical facts underlying this boom and provides exclusive figures on the intra Med fleet, as well as a wealth of information on operators, services, ships, completed by pertinent statistics.
At 1st January 2008, the total fleet deployed on intra Med trades reached 262 ships totaling 227,000 teu, against 187 ships for 93,400 teu on 1st January 1999. There has been an acceleration of the growth during the past three years, with an average annual growth rate of 14.8% between January 2005 and January 2008.
The intra Med trades employ 2% of the fleet deployed on liner trades, in teu terms, compared with 1.9% at in the early 2000s, according to AXS-Alphaliner records.
The accompanying graph on the following page shows the evolution of the fleet between January 1999 and January 2008, including the distribution by size ranges (expressed in nominal teu), as well as a tentative forecast of what the intra Med fleet could be in January 2011 (based on an annual fleet expansion of 13.5%).
In terms of size, the year 2007 has seen the assignment of 2,500 teu ships on intra Med trades for the first time.
The top three carriers, Maersk Line, MSC and CMA CGM, cumulate 50% of the teu capacity deployed on pure intra Med services at January 1st 2008, against 25% in January 1999. Within the space of nine years, the fleet deployed by these three carriers have been multiplied by five, growing from 23,200 teu to 116,000 teu.
These figures demonstrate the will of global carriers to control their own feeder services, at the expense of the common feeder operators, which see their share of the Intra Med feeder trade receding month after month.
The survey covers also intra Med regional container trades, shared by deep sea carriers such as Maersk Line, MSC, CMA CGM and Zim and by a few niche carriers, among which East Med Express Services (EMES), the liner arm of the Istanbul-based Arkas Group, the rising star on this sector.
Short profiles of each of the operators involved are provided, together with an exhaustive list of their intra Med services, showing slot buyers, size of ships deployed, sailing frequency and rotation. A section is devoted to the hubs while an annex lists all the ships deployed with essential characteristics.
All the data enclosed in the survey has been extracted from the permanently updated AXS-Alphaliner database, and from its historical records.
