In 2017, "Bigger is better", "bigger is better", became the credo of the global shipping industry.

From April 1, the four major shipping alliances were reorganized into three larger alliances.

In just two months from March to May, the world's largest container ship record was refreshed three times. The current largest record holder is the "Orient Hong Kong" ship of Hong Kong Orient Overseas, whose container loading capacity can reach 21413 TEUs. Recently, on August 3, the media reported that CMA CGM was about to sign a contract to build nine larger 22,000 TEU container ships.

The reason for this round of large-scale ship competition is that during the recession of the shipping industry in the past few years, shipping companies wanted to reduce unit container operating costs and improve operating performance. But in fact, this kind of competitive advantage has a premise, because although large ships can reduce the cost of unit containers, at the same time, they may offset the advantages of large ships due to the high empty load rate due to insufficient market supply.

Therefore, Maersk Line, the initiator of the big ship race, also has repeated attitudes towards big ships. In June 2015, Maersk and Daewoo Shipbuilding signed an order for 11 ultra-large container ships of 19,630 TEU, while retaining the option for another 6 ships. However, in November of the same year, it announced that it would give up the option and announced that it would stop sailing for a ship of 18,270 TEU. 3E-class new ships. At that time, some experts said that in the next few years, there may be no new orders for ships with a capacity of more than 18,000 TEUs. However, in November 2016, Maersk restarted the large ship plan, announcing that the previously ordered second-generation 3E-class container ships will be delivered successively between April and May 2017. In February 2017, Maersk announced the postponement of the delivery of nine large ships after releasing its 2016 loss report. Judging from the performance of Maersk, the strategy of large ships during the recession of the shipping industry has not been successful. With the recovery of the shipping industry this year, Maersk has launched a big ship race.

Since April this year, Maersk Line has changed its hesitant attitude and started to receive large ships again, which has led to a wave of large ships. This is probably inseparable from the global economic recovery reflected in the data in the first quarter, because the shipping market is closely related to the global macro economy and international trade.

In fact, the big ship strategy is more suitable for the prosperity of the shipping industry. Because the supply of goods in the market is sufficient during the prosperous period, large ships with lower unit container cost have an advantage in the price war, and it is easier to achieve full load and expand market share. In this way, more companies are forced to join the "arms race" of building large ships.

It is understood that most of the newly added 20,000 TEU ships in the shipping market are put into the Asia-Europe route. Since the beginning of this year, China's coastal ports have also set off an upsurge of merging large ports. From May to June, Jiangsu, Liaoning, and Fujian successively carried out provincial-level port reorganizations. As for the reasons for port integration, some shipping industry insiders believe that this will help avoid redundant construction and homogeneous vicious competition. In fact, it is also an important reason to use big ports to connect with big leagues and the era of big ships.

Because the big leagues and big ships favor big ports, the competition in the port market will be stronger for the strong. According to Drewry's analysis, based on the weekly port calls of the three major alliances, China's Shanghai Port, Ningbo Port, Yantian Port, Hong Kong Port, and Qingdao Port are the most. Among the ports in Asia, there are also the ports of Singapore and Busan. It can be seen that all of them are big ports. (Photos of Shanghai Port, Ningbo Port, Yantian Port, Hong Kong Port, Qingdao Port, Singapore Port, and Busan Port) Moreover, as there are more and more large ships, even large port companies must invest huge sums of money in port dredging , increase berths for large ships, and strengthen the construction of port collection and distribution infrastructure, otherwise it will face huge challenges.

This year, China’s Shanghai Port, Bangladesh’s Chittagong Port, Europe’s Rotterdam and Antwerp Ports, and the U.S. Port of Seattle have all experienced severe congestion. Among them, the centralized adjustment of shipping schedules by major shipping alliances and the pressure brought about by the expansion of container ships are important reasons.

However, the large-scale port investment is huge. For example, the investment in Shanghai Yangshan Deepwater Port is as high as 50 billion yuan, which is far beyond the economic capacity of many small and medium-sized port companies and local governments. In order to concentrate capital, manpower, land, technology and other economic factor resources to upgrade port infrastructure, realize internal division of labor, fully embrace the era of big ships, and develop the big ship economy, China's coastal provincial-level port reorganization came into being.

Conversely, due to the widening infrastructure gap between large ports and small ports, the major shipping alliances that operate large ships will prefer large ports, which will also prompt them to build more large ships to achieve economies of scale.

Currently, Shanghai Waigaoqiao Shipbuilding and South Korea's Hyundai Heavy Industries are competing for the order of nine world's largest container ships from France's CMA CGM. It can be seen that in order to survive, shipyards are also trying their best to improve their large ship construction capabilities. At the same time, small and medium-sized shipyards with insufficient strength often go bankrupt.

All in all, in the era of big alliances, big ships, and big ports, shipping companies, ports, and shipyards are already "involuntary in the rivers and lakes", and they promote each other on the road to large-scale shipping. The market situation of "the bigger the better" is still there. Will spiral up!