According to reports, Taiwan’s leading shipping line Evergreen Marine Line has placed an order for twenty 15,000 TEU container ships .
Five containerships have been booked from South Korea’s Samsung Heavy Industries (SHI), another five from China’s Hudong-Zhonghua, while the remaining 10 were ordered from Japanese shipbuilder Imabari through an agreement with Shoei Kisen, the shipyard’s leasing and outfitting arm.
“Evergreen is continuously studying various vessel types and will place orders or charter the most suitable vessels based on market requirements. Evergreen continues with the fleet renewal program with the purpose of optimizing service quality and competitiveness ” , the company said in an official statement.
Lars Jensen , CEO and partner at Sea Intelligence Consulting, said in a post on his Linkedin account that Evergreen’s order book now represents about 750,000 TEU and more than 50% of its current fleet.
“This order does not necessarily indicate a sudden volume rush by Evergreen and therefore should not be seen as a sign of a new volume and price war in the industry,” he said.
“Despite having almost continuously had an order backlog of around 30-50% of its fleet since 2011, its annual capacity growth this decade has been a somewhat moderate 7.7%. ”
“It is clear that one of its key roles in the “container shipping ecosystem is to bring new tonnage to the market and pass on older tonnage to other players. ”
According to information available from VesselsValue, the company already has 20 newbuildings on order, including ten 23,000-TEU containerships in three separate yards and ten smaller containerships with deliveries spread between 2021 and 2022.
According to the company, it will choose the most suitable shipyards among Hudong Zhonghua Shipbuilding, Jiangnan Shipbuilding, Imabari Shipbuilding, Samsung Heavy Industries and Hyundai Heavy Industries to build the vessels.
Evergreen expects to spend between $2.3 billion and $2.6 billion to build the vessels.
According to data from Alphaliner, these indicate that Evergreen currently operates a fleet of 197 vessels with a total capacity of 1.28 million TEU, making it the seventh largest container company in the world. It currently has an order book of 60 vessels with a total capacity of around 454,200 teu.
