Capacity is being cut drastically on the Asia-Europe routes as the slack season starts. Several strings or loops on the Asia-Europe and Asia-Mediterranean routes have been discontinued while big shipping groups such as CKYH and the Grand Alliance are pulling out individual services to suit market demand.
Capacity levels on the transpacific is also being cut but only marginally. On the Asia-US West Coast and Asia-US East Coast routes, the tendency has increasingly focussed on suspension of individual sailings.
Capacity deployed on the Asia-North Europe trade in December 2009 is more than 16 percent down against the same period last year, but this figure is dwarfed by the nearly 23 percent cutback on the Asia-Mediterranean trade over the same time frame.
These moves have effectively taken out around 7,000 TEUs of weekly capacity from the North Europe trade and 5,000 TEUs from the Mediterranean trade.
The CKYH initiative kicked off in October, but it took almost six weeks before the Grand Alliance lines, Hapag-Lloyd, NYK and OOCL, made known their intentions of cutting capacity.
Cargonews Asia
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