“We appear to have reached the bottom of the demand downturn in container shipping”
According to Lars Jensen from SeaIntelligence, THE Alliance is now re-inserting 2 sailings on the Transpacific which has previously been cancelled. This follows last week where THE Alliance also re-inserted four previously cancelled sailings on Asia-Mediterranean.
It should be noted that they still have a substantial amount of blank sailings; this development merely reduces the level slightly.
This tells us, at least for now, that the demand downturn has bottomed out and carriers – at least in THE Alliance – are now seeing sufficient demand for their remaining services to even up the capacity a bit.
Furthermore, it also serves to demonstrate the carriers’ approach to capacity management in the current crisis.
They would rather pro-actively cancel too much capacity and then later re-insert in case there is more demand, instead of hoping for demand to materialize and then have to either cancel at the last minute or sail with underutilized vessels.
