IT seems that some of the industry’s more optimistic operators wish to register a complaint. As Monty Python once almost put it: shipping’s not dead, it’s just resting.
The newbuilding over-supply is not as bad as the headlines suggest, Seaspan’s buoyant chief executive Gerry Wang insisted last week. Reports that over 10% of the containership fleet are being laid up are plain wrong. They are not laid up, just “idling to be activated”.
Presumably the shipowners were also just pining for the fjords, which explains why there are currently so many vessels sat there, ‘idling’.
Certainly Mr Wang is right to point out the technical difference between being fully laid up and just having no work, but the technicalities to do not detract from the overall bleak picture the industry is facing.
Most owners laying up vessels are opting for the temporary lay-up and adopting a wait-and-see approach, however, if the crisis were to deepen, more permanent lay-ups are almost inevitable.
Even with a more positive scenario, where the economy picks up to 3% growth after 2010, the Norwegian classification society Det Norske Veritas estimates that there could still be an over capacity of 4,000 ships in the market.
While the headlines may suggest otherwise, the pessimists do not have a monopoly on being able to predict the outcome of this downturn.
World trade is not a dead parrot and profits will return, but the reality is that in the current market those owners that are not laying up ships are only keeping them moving at breakeven rates in many cases.
For the maritime press to ignore this and only focus on the positives would be plain ridiculous.
