Efforts remain underway to get to grips with overcapacity in the container shipping industry, with the Baltic and International Maritime Council reporting at the start of November that containership demolition has reached an all-time high, with ships totalling a capacity of 500,000 TEU having already been scrapped this year.
Nonetheless, most of this demolition is accounted for by now-obsolete Panamax vessels, which continue to be replaced by bigger ships. Drewry reported in October that the next two years will witness, "annual fleet growth of between 5 and 6 percent and many more ultra large container vessels (ULCVs)", though the consultancy claims the market has bottomed out.
One bright spot at present is the performance of air freight. Whilst officials at IATA have stressed that the long-term condition of the industry is not good, the organisation did report that freight volumes increased by 6.1 percent year-on-year (measured in FTKs) in September, exceeding a capacity increase of 4.7 percent over the same timeframe. This tallies with the results of the Situational Index for Air Freight; the one bright spot in the Stifel Logistics Confidence Index this month, which recorded an improvement in the present market.
