Ahead of the demise of the 2M Alliance at the end of next year, MSC and Maersk have already ‘decoupled’ their fleets, deploying their vessels on individual service loops, reports loadstar.
Alphaliner said: “Services previously operated with a mix of MSC and Maersk ships have gradually been altered to leave one ship operator per loop.”
On the Asia-North Europe trade lane, for example, eeSea data confirms that Maersk as the sole vessel provider for the AE5/Albatross, AE10/Silk and AE7/Condor loops, with MSC as the vessel operator on the AE55/Griffin and AE6/Lion strings, along with its standalone Swan service.
MSC
MSC, with a current fleet of 5.5m teu and a huge orderbook of some 1.5m teu, has already taken delivery of two new build 24,000 teu ultra-large vessels this month and would be able to operate independently at short notice, if required.
Maersk
Meanwhile, Maersk’s methanol-powered newbuilds will start to arrive next year, and Alphaliner suggests the carrier, with its ‘green loops’ USP, will be unlikely to want to vessel-share them, and it will be able to underpin its standalone east-west network.
It noted that the Ocean Alliance, of CMA CGM, Cosco (including OOCL) and Evergreen, was already the largest VSA, with a combined capacity of 4.22m teu compared with the total for THE Alliance partners, Hapag-Lloyd, ONE, Yang Ming and HMM, of around 3.1m teu, which is similar to the 2M capacity.
Notwithstanding the interpretation that shipping alliances will remain a legal way for carriers to cooperate following the recent decision by the EC not to extend liner shipping’s Consortia Block Exemption Regulation (CBER) next April, Alphaliner speculated on whether the huge planned expansion of the Ocean Alliance could be an acid test for the new regulatory order.The consultant said it could “become a test case for how large the mega-alliances will be allowed to grow”.
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Source :Loadstar
