CONTAINER MANAGEMENT: NOVEMBER 2015

29 Дек

В ноябрьском номере журнала “CONTAINER MANAGEMENT” наше внимание привлекли следующие материалы:

– Panama Canal expansion: too little, too late? – редакционная статья, автором которой является Joe Lo, посвящена вопросам, связанным с реконструкцией Панамского канала и планами ввести его в эксплуатацию с апреля 2016 года.

– MAERSK LINE SLASHES PROFIT EXPECTATION BY US$600M – новостной материал, содержащий важные статистические данные, свидетельствующие о кризисных явлениях в морской экономике.

– … AND FALLING FREIGHT RATE HITS OOCL REVENUES – новостной материал, в котором содержатся подобные же сведения, показывающие связь между падением ставок фрахта и кризисными тенденциями в морской торговле.

– Various crises in Russia and Ukraine are affecting the Black Sea ports, sometimes in surprising ways, as Joe Lo reports – аналитический материал Joe Lo, в котором анализируется состояние российской и украинской экономики, в особенности, в сфере портового контейнерного хозяйства, причем особое внимание уделяется влиянию падения курса российского рубля на эту сферу экономики.

– Container ships and the piracy threat in 2015 – аналитический материал (автор Tim Hart), посвященный исследованию тенденций в отношении пиратства и вооруженного разбоя на море, автор которого приходит к заключению, что преступность на море продолжает оказывать негативное действие, в частности, на сферу морских контейнерных перевозок.

Аs delegates gathered in Panama City for the TOC Americas show, the Panama Canal was naturally the centre of attention and the subject of many urgent questions. Will it be ready on time? Will it be big enough? Which ports will benefit?

This year’s TOC Americas event, which took place in Panama City on October 13-15, opened with a speech by Jorge Quijano, the CEO of the Panama Canal Authority (ACP), who insisted that, despite leaks in the Cocoli Locks, the canal would be ready to open by April 2016.

He was followed by Oscar Bazan, the ACP’s marketing manager, who said that he was tired of being asked by carriers whether April 2016 was a firm date. The answer was yes, he said. Another ACP employee told me that the expanded canal’s opening ceremony and transit are already being planned.

Apart from the ACP, however, not a single person I spoke to, either at the conference or at Panama’s ports, thought it would be ready on time. Even my taxi driver was sceptical. “There’s no way it will be ready by April,” he said, and I am inclined to agree. How can the locks start leaking without that causing a delay? That’s before we get into the lack of water in Gatun Lake and the question of how tugboats will safely help ships to transit, about which the unions will have something to say.

Remarkably then, the well-respected Senor Quijano seemed to be escaping criticism, with delegates blaming the builders and sympathising with the ACP. Respect for Quijano bordered on adoration in some cases. One smitten American said to me: “He’s just so dashing: he looks the part and he is the part.” While the construction consortium may be largely at fault, it was chosen by the ACP, which therefore must take its share of the blame.

Another question for the ACP is whether, even after expansion, the canal will still be too small. While ships of 14,000 teu will be able to transit, the world’s biggest vessels are nearly 20,000 teu, and are getting bigger. Quijano said that he had no regrets about not building it bigger. For this, he gave three reasons, the first two of

which seem unconvincing to me.

Firstly, Panama is a small country and the canal expansion is a big investment, so the return on that investment needs to be high. Secondly, he is not convinced that the size of container ships will continue to increase, pointing to the example of oil tankers, which increased but then decreased in size. Finally, he said that a bigger canal would need more freshwater despite Panama’s ample rainfall.

To be fair to him, comparisons with the Suez Canal, which can accommodate the world’s biggest ships and was expanded in the space of just one year, with Panama’s nine or 10 years are unjust. The Suez-Canal is a saltwater canal built through sand, by a country with a GDP of US$272bn.

The Panama Canal, on the other hand, is freshwater, its expansion requires the removal of land, hills and even unexploded American bombs, and Panama has a GDP of just US$42bn. Nevertheless, if an expansion is worth doing, it’s worth doing properly and, with the biggest ships still unable to transit, the expansion looks only half-complete.

The expanded canal will open at some point, however, and it should bring increased throughput to the Caribbean. Optimistic estimates are for around 5m teu extra in tran­shipment volumes for the region, which has led many ports to expand in order to try and attract this new business. Not all of them will be successful.

Intuitively, you would think that the most obvious beneficiaries will be the ports at either end of the canal, in Panama City and Colon. On the contrary, however, the expansion may work against them, as big ships will no longer be forced to transfer their cargoes to smaller ships, trains or trucks in order to cross the Panamanian isthmus.

With the era of ‘forced transhipment’ over, Panama’s new and existing terminals will have to fight their competitors for transhipment cargoes on their own merits alone. The competition will be fierce.

Автор: Joe Lo, Assistant Editor

Источник: CONTAINER MANAGEMENT. – 2015. – November. – P. 5

The Maersk Group announced on October 23 that it expects to make US$600m less profit in 2015 than it had predicted a few months ago.

The group said that it’s shipping line subsidiary Maersk Line would make US$1.6bn in profit this year, instead of the US$2.2bn it had previously predicted.

The group as a whole therefore is predicted to make a profit of only US$3.4bn instead of US$4bn.

Its share price fell after the news was announced.

According to a company statement, US$500m of the reduced projection can be attributed to a decline in the freight rate of US$100 per forty foot equivalent (FFE) and US$100m can be put down to a volume reduction of 200,000 teu.

The statement continued: “The container shipping market has de­teriorated beyond the Group’s ex­pectations especially in the later part of Q3 and October and the Group does not expect market recovery in 2015.”

Group CEO Nils Andersen said: “Maersk Line has, over the years, taken steps to ensure a cost effective and resilient operation but the current deterioration in the container shipping market is impacting also our business.” In the third quarter of 2015, Maersk Line achieved an average freight rate of US$2,163 per FFE and carried 4.85m teu, lower than expected but up slightly from 4.8m teu in the same period last year.

The company said that, as a result of the market circumstanc­es, initiatives have been taken to adjust Maersk Line’s network accordingly.

An example of this was when, on October 20,2015, Maersk Line and MSC suspended their joint Asia-Black Sea service.

Источник: CONTAINER MANAGEMENT. – 2015. – November. – P. 26.

Orient Overseas Container Line has announced that, despite a 1.9% year-on-year increase in throughput in the third quarter of 2015, its revenue was down by 12.2% to US$1,33bn. This was due to the average freight rate declining by 7.6%.

Throughput and revenue performance varied greatly from region to region with Asia to Europe faring the worst. Throughput was down 11.5% in the third quarter and revenue was down 32%.

The Trans-Pacific trade fared the best as volumes increased by 9.5% and revenue was down by only 0.2%.

In the Trans-Atlantic trade, unusually, throughput was down by more than revenue. Throughput was down by 9.6% and revenue by 8.6%. For Intra-Asia/Australasia, these figures were +4.6% and -13.4%.

Источник: CONTAINER MANAGEMENT. – 2015. – November. – P. 26.

t has been an eventful year in the north of the Black Sea. Conflict has flared between Ukraine and Russia, leading to sanctions, disrupted trade flows and the Crimea and parts of Eastern Ukraine becoming in effect part of Russia.

All this comes on top of the oil price crash and the consequent collapse in the value of the rouble – which Andrey Naraevskiy, director of business development at Global Container Service (GCS), says is the biggest problem for Russian ports in general and for Novorossiysk, where his company operates several terminals and intermodal services, in particular.

“I would not say that sanctions on Russia had a serious impact on the Russian economy,” he told CM. “The Russian crisis is only about 10% caused by sanctions and 90% caused by a crash in the oil price and the subsequent collapse of the rouble, which has hit imports.”

This crash happened at the end of 2014, and in 2015 throughput at Novorossiysk, the Black Sea’s biggest container port, has fallen by over 20% so far, to some 600,000 teu.

While this is obviously worrying, it is in fact a better performance than at many other Russian container ports. According to Naraevskiy, Kaliningrad’s throughput is down by 56%, those at Vladivostock and St Petersburg by 28% each and Vostochny’s by 23%. “Novorossiysk has had the smallest reduction of any Russian container port,” he said.

Russian sanctions on EU and US foodstuffs may even have helped the port, as Russia now imports more from the Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa and less from Western Europe. These reefer imports are more likely to come through the Black Sea than the Baltic.

Russia’s recent conquest of the Crimea and its control of eastern parts of Ukraine have also expanded Novorossiysk’s hinterland, according to Naraevskiy. “Novorossiysk now has some flows to Crimea, which now belongs to Russia, and also some transit flows from eastern parts of Ukraine, which have difficulties trading via Ukrainian ports.”

ROUBLE COLLAPSE

On top of this, although the devalued rouble has hit imports, it has also made harbour dues cheaper. Along with cheap bunker prices, this helps draw carriers to the port. Naraevs­kiy estimated that lines can save about USS100 per tonne on bunker fuel and that a deep-sea vessel taking 4,000-5,000 tonnes can save about USS0.5m every time it calls.

The port currently handles four deep-sea services, two from Maersk Line (ME3 and Ecumed), one from 2M and one from Zim. The size of these vessels is limited to 265 m long and 4,500 t£u because of a lack of berth length at the port. Naraevskiy admits that, until recently, it was one of the least developed Black Sea gateways.

One of the main problems holding back the Novorossi­ysk Commercial Sea Port (NCSP) terminal is the strength of its quay, which can only hold mobile harbour cranes with a comparatively small productivity and outreach. In September 2015, NCSP received two additional mobile harbour cranes that can handle 8,000 teu ships with up to 18 rows of containers across.

The port, like every Black Sea port, will not be able to receive any ships bigger than 10,000 teu or 300 m long because these big ships cannot make the journey from the Marmaris Sea through the centre of Istanbul to the Black Sea.

There has been much talk, over recent years, of building a new canal linking the Marmaris and the Black Seas, but Naraevskiy is sceptical. “I don’t know how realistic that looks. I don’t think it will happen in the near future because so many hubs are built over the other side of the Bosphorus offering good connections to the Black Sea.”

This is a point also made by Neil Davidson, a senior analyst at Drewry, who said: “Most Black Sea container traffic is carried by feeder sen/ices rather than direct mainline calls. The feeders use hubs such as Ambarli in Turkey, Piraeus in Greece or East Port Said in Egypt.”

In June 2014 the CFO of the Delo Group, which operates the NUTEP terminal in Novorossiysk, said that the port’s increasing capacity “could reshape the entire Black Sea market by allowing direct calls to Novorossiysk, bypassing the traditional transhipment hubs”. The Bosphorus Strait remains one of the biggest obstacles to this ambition, however.

In October 2015, Maersk and MSC announced they were cancelling their Great Sea service AE3 loop due to “market circumstances”. This service came from Asia directly to Constanta, lliyichevsk, Odessa and Novorossiysk. The region will now be covered by a relay service from Asyaport in Turkey.

ECONOMIC PAIN IN UKRAINE

In terms of economic growth, Ukraine is faring even worse than Russia. Its GDP fell by nearly 7% in 2014 and the World Bank predicts that it will shrink by a further 7.5% in 2015, before achieving some slight growth again in 2016.

The lack of economic growth has been exacerbated by military conflict. According to analyst Informall Business Group, the eastern part of Ukraine, which was attacked by Russia, generates 20% of Ukraine’s imports and 35% of its exports.

The country’s container throughput is also shrinking, falling from 780,000 teu in 2013 to 667,000 teu in 2014, and a throughput of 620,000 teu is projected this year. This has increased Ukraine’s problem with overcapacity, as it has a total capacity of 2.45m teu.

The situation is worse at some ports than others. Container

Terminal llyichevsk (CTI), for example, has a capacity of

850.0       teu but in 2014 recorded a throughput of just

200.0       teu. BKP Odessa, on the other hand, was nearer capacity, with a throughput of 150,000 teu against a capacity of 250,000 teu.

Over the last few years, the country’s two biggest terminals, HPC Odessa and CTI llyichevsk, have faced declining volumes, particularly since the end of 2013. On the other hand, BKP Odessa and TIS Yuzhny have seen their volumes increase over this period.

In 2014, however, shipping lines made a number of changes that have shaken up this pattern. The 2M Alliance chose HPC Odessa and Fishport in favour of BKP Odessa and CTI llyichevsk. On the other hand, Ocean Three chose BKP Odessa and CTI llyichevsk. As Maersk is the biggest shipping line serving Ukraine, HPC Odessa and Fishport have been the winners from these changes.

CTI llyichevsk’s falling throughput is likely to be one of the reasons why Russian terminal operator Global Ports has not exercised its right to purchase 50% of the terminal for US$60m, an option agreed in 2013 as part of its takeover of the NCC Group. This option expires in December 2016 and a company spokesperson told CM. “Global Ports is focused on leveraging its core assets and existing infrastructure to increase efficiency and drive cash flow across the business and does not currently view expansion opportunities in Ukraine as one of its strategic priorities.”

Автор: Joe Lo, Assistant Editor

Источник: CONTAINER MANAGEMENT. – 2015. – November. – P. 50 – 51.

Tim Hart, senior maritime analyst at Control Risks, reports on the latest data on piracy

Аccording to Control Risks’ statistics, cases of piracy and armed robbery at sea involving container vessels have more than doubled so far in 2015. This is mainly due to a sharp rise in incidents involving vessels under way in the Singapore Strait, which have increased by over 200% compared with the same period in 2014. However, it is also important to recognise that incidents involving container vessels have accounted for just 7% of global pirate activity so far this year.

Security threats remain a part of day-to-day business operations for the container shipping sector, and the impact of world events on vessel operations is closely observed by the industry. While Somali pirate groups may have brought maritime crime to international attention, today’s criminal threats to merchant vessels and their crews are more likely to be opportunistic cases of theft and robbery – typically during the hours of darkness – while vessels are either alongside or anchored off major ports.

The accessibility of container cargo to local thieves can also be an attractive prospect compared with other vessel types. Yet. although statistics may point to a higher frequency of port and anchorage crime across a range of vessel types, container vessels and their crews remain exposed to more severe threats.

SOUTH-EAST ASIA

Piracy in South-East Asia has received much internation­al attention over the past 12 months, largely because of some high-profile incidents, specifically those involving hi­jackings of product tankers, and a steady increase in activity. Overall, in 2015 the region has accounted for around 40% of global piracy incidents, with container vessels targeted more in South-East Asia than in any other regions combined, according to Control Risks’ statistics.

Most of these incidents are linked to theft and robbery rather than kidnapping or hijacking. At the same time, however, cases of hijacking-for-cargo theft have increased in frequency compared with previous years. Nevertheless, criminal groups continue to focus on small, locally operated product tankers carrying refined oil products or, sporadical­ly, barge-towing tugs, and there is no evidence to suggest that they are looking to diversify their targeting.

However, for container vessels it is the Singapore Strait which has seen the most significant increase in incidents this year. Cases of theft and robbery involving vessels under way, specifically in the western section of the strait, have risen sharply in 2015 and look set to continue.

While these incidents may not be as high-profile as kidnappings or hijackings in other regions, personnel remain at risk. Crew members on container vessels have been held hostage, threatened and injured by assailants armed with guns and knives during these incidents.

AFRICA

Levels of recorded pirate activity in West Africa have continued to decrease in 2015. following the slight decline seen in 2014. However, maritime threats off Nigeria continue to dominate reporting, with high levels of activity accounting for more than 75% of all recorded incidents in the region.

For commercial shipping in the Gulf of Guinea, the specific threat can vary dramatically depending on route, location and cargo. For example, a container vessel anchored off Togo is less likely to be targeted by Nigerian hijacking-for-cargo groups, who – in common with groups in South-East Asia – will focus on product tankers carrying refined fuel cargoes. However, the vessel will still be vulnerable to local criminal groups attempting to board vessels in order to steal ships’ stores or valuable equipment.

For container vessels, the most significant threat is that posed by kidnapping groups operating off the oil-produc- ing Niger delta region in southeastern Nigeria. Although kid- napping-for-ransom groups operating in these waters tend to be associated with attacks on the offshore oil and gas industry, container vessels have also been targeted while under way in both 2014 and 2015.

While these attacks were unsuccessful, they could have had much more serious consequences. In 2013, a total of nine crew members were kidnapped from two container vessels off the Niger Delta coast.

The number of incidents has dwindled even further off the east coast of Africa. Somali pirate groups have not successfully hijacked a commercial vessel since 2012 or attacked one in more than a year. With minimal activity and only occasional suspicious approaches or skiff sightings, questions have been raised about the necessity of security measures, amid concerns over the future of naval forces in the region.

Although the mandates of major counter-piracy task forces may be in place until the end of 2016. in reality assets are already being redeployed from patrols. This was further reflected in October 2015, when shipping groups announced a reduction of the designated “high-risk area”.

Somali piracy remains unlikely to return to the same levels as seen off the Horn of Africa between 2008 and 2011, but the risk of sporadic attacks persists, particularly for vessels sailing close to the Somali coast.

UNDERSTANDING MARITIME THREATS

As industry focus shifts from region to region, it is often the case that little attention is paid to specific threats within these areas, and to how they differ by both location and sector. In certain areas, specific threats can change multiple times in a single voyage and depend on the type of vessel and the route it is taking.

For container shipping, understanding these threats and the impact they have on day-to-day operations is vital in developing an effective response. While maritime crime will remain a global issue for the container shipping sector, localised security trends will continue to change and evolve.

Control Risks is an independent global risk and strategic consulting firm: www.controlrisks.com

Автор: Tim Hart

Источник: CONTAINER MANAGEMENT. – 2015. – November. – P. 68 – 69.