Category: Uncategorized

China’s vast shipbuilding capacity is here to stay

Top shipyards to hold their position in a market downturn, with offshore converts and coastal players likely to bear the brunt. China’s shipbuilding industry is expanding at its fastest pace in years, reviving memories of the capacity boom that preceded the sector’s painful downturn after 2008.

Maritime Strategies International (MSI) director Stuart Nicoll said order surges in both periods were driven largely by strong freight markets and exceptionally high profitability for shipowners. In the run-up to 2008, rapid industrialisation and construction activity in China fuelled strong growth in seaborne trade, creating a shortage of shipping capacity and sending earnings soaring. Global cargo growth averaged 4.2% a year between 2000 and 2008, with particularly strong growth in dry bulk commodities and containerised trade. The backdrop to the current boom is different, Nicoll said. “Shipping markets have also enjoyed periods of exceptionally high earnings over the past five years, but trade growth has been much weaker,” he added. Read more at TradeWinds

Tankers enter the death zone

Like climbers entering the death zone above 8,000 metres en route to the summit of Everest, VLCCs have entered their own peak: the moment where prices for secondhand tonnage surpass newbuild prices, and sell signs flash hard. These moments tend to be fleeting and have historically been associated with the hottest stages of shipping cycles. The question is how often the market has reached this altitude before, and how long it can survive there.

Data from Maritime Strategies International (MSI) makes the VLCC phenomenon look rarer still. Its monthly matrix records just one previous VLCC inversion since 2000, lasting three months.

“This is very uncommon in VLCCs compared to other asset classes,” said Adam Kent, managing director of MSI. Read more at Splash247.com

Premier Alliance joins accelerating return to Suez

The Premier Alliance is preparing to send one of its Asia-Europe strings back through the Suez Canal this month, adding fresh momentum to the container sector’s retreat from lengthy Cape of Good Hope diversions and sharpening concerns over how much vessel capacity a fuller Red Sea return could release back into the market.

MSI has warned that renewed Suez transits could weigh on earnings as the shorter routing reduces vessel demand, although its latest containership outlook still sees charter markets remaining strong into the first half of 2027, particularly for feeder and midsize tonnage. Read more at Splash247.com

MSI forecasts firm dry bulk market into 2027, driving further newbuilding orders

Dry bulk vessel demand growth, underpinned by market disruptions has continued to outpace supply in 2026, creating exceptionally firm market balances that should carry forward into 2027.

In its Q3 report ‘Excess All Areas’, MSI notes that dry bulk earnings and asset values have risen to multi-year highs through 2026, supported by exceptionally firm market balances and this strength has generated a significant supply response. Read more at India Shipping News

The charts that explain shipping’s extraordinary decade

Shipping has spent the 2020s lurching from one earnings boom to another, with successive crises repeatedly rescuing markets that conventional supply-demand analysis suggested should be weakening.

Two new charts capture how today’s supercycle came to be, and which sectors face a likely downturn.

Braemar’s decade-long earnings chart reads increasingly like a geopolitical timeline. Covid propelled containers to extraordinary heights. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine transformed energy trades. Gaza and the Red Sea crisis extended voyage distances across multiple sectors. Now the Iran war has driven tanker and LPG markets almost vertically into record territory. Read more at Splash247.com

Shipping’s crystal ball cracks in the 2020s

Shipping has long been treated as an early warning system for the world economy. In an era of wars, rerouting, services and AI, the relationship is becoming far harder to read. Splash investigates whether this old adage rings true still, or even if it ever did.

“In previous decades, it was certainly true that the shipping markets served as an early indicator of the strength of the global economy,” Adam Kent, managing director of UK consultancy Maritime Strategies International (MSI), tells Splash.

Dry bulk demand, Kent says, has historically provided an important guide to growth in emerging economies, most notably China this century, while containerised cargoes offered a proxy for Western consumer demand. Read more at Splash247.com

Middle East tanker spree stokes VLCC glut fears as 2028–2029 deliveries loom

As the boom in the very large crude carrier (VLCC) market has continued this year on the back of the Middle East war, some are raising concerns about a supply glut in the tanker market.

According to Maritime Strategies International (MSI) on the 28th August, 177 VLCCs were contracted for new construction worldwide in the first half of this year. The total deadweight tonnage (DWT) of VLCCs ordered in the first half reached 54.5 million DWT, surpassing the previous annual record of 32.6 million DWT set in 2006. Read more at Chosun Biz