The Japanese cargo ship that blocked the Suez Canal remains small in the face of new mega-vessels that are leaving Asian shipyards and which, according to experts, pose increasing risks to the shipping sector.
With a length of 400 meters and a capacity of about 220,000 tons, the protagonist of the incident, the Ever Given, is just the tip of the iceberg of a sector led by Korean and Chinese companies, and the trend aims at ever-increasing sizes in line with the rise of international trade.
The capacity of container vessels has skyrocketed by 1,500% since they began operating more than half a century ago. In the last decade alone, its carrying potential has doubled, according to data from German financial and insurance group Allianz Global.
BIGGER, MORE DANGEROUS
“Building ships only for economies of scale is no longer enough,” Rahul Khanna, Allianz’s global maritime risk consultant, told Efe, who sees “a clear gap” between the exponential growth of ships and the pace at which they are apply risk mitigation measures.
Shipowners in South Korea and China are leading this “arms race” and in 2020 43% and 41% of the global orders market in the sector were distributed, respectively, according to official data and the British consultancy Clarkson.
The five largest models of freighters today, operating mostly since 2020, are all of South Korean manufacture and its capacity ranges from 23,000 to 24,000 TEU, well above the Ever Given, which gives an idea of where the sector is heading.
Last January, the world’s largest commercial shipowner, China State Shipbuiding Corporation (CSSC) delivered to the French logistics company CMA CGM 1 megawatter with a capacity for up to 23,000 containers, which exceeds about 3,000 the ability of the Ever Given.
The new ship, 400 meters long and 61 meters wide, was the fifth of the same characteristics delivered to this company since September, when the ship Jacques Saade became, according to CSSC, the first cargo ship of 23,000 containers powered by liquefied natural gas from the world.
Between the dangers that entail these enormous ships are the majors difficulties in case of accidents like fires or collisions, their greater exhibition to extreme meteorological conditions or strandings like the one of the Ever Given in the sea route of Egypt, according to Khanna.
LESSONS FROM SUEZ
The Suez Canal blockade caused daily losses of between $ 12 million and $ 15 million a day to the shipping industry, according to initial estimates, although it also left some lessons to be learned.
Ports and canals “have not always been developed enough” to accommodate oversized ships and in some cases have become “relatively narrow” and significantly reduced “maneuvering space and margin of error,” the aforementioned captain and marine risk consultant.
In addition, many ports “do not have enough infrastructure to deal with megavessels if something goes wrong,” stresses the expert, who adds that “other ship rescue operations of this type have taken much longer than the Ever Given.” .
The Suez crisis has opened the debate on whether the size of maritime waterways such as this or that of Panama could ultimately represent a limit to the size of cargo ships, and whether the necessary further development of infrastructure could undermine the profitability of even larger megavessels.
In Khanna’s opinion, the Ever Green incident “will not be enough to stop the growth” of these ships, which will continue to enlarge as long as infrastructure risk prevention measures are updated. , maritime operators and shipowners.
POWERFUL INDUSTRIES
In South Korea, the shipbuilding industry was born in the 1970s from the hand of Hyundai Heavy Industries (HHI) and its president Chung Ju-yung, an iconic North Korean-born businessman who was one of the fathers of the economic miracle. South Korea, until 2000 was one of the main economic legs of Asian country.
The competitiveness of its prices and its growing technical capacity to build supercar and supertankers made HHI go from being a national leader to being among the dominators of the global market, a position it aspires to strengthen with its plans. absorb Daewoo Shipbulging & Marine Engineering.
These two groups and Samsung Heavy Industries had a combined turnover of 28.8 trillion won (about $ 25.48 billion) in 2020, and 9 of the 15 largest supercar models in the world came out of their shipyards.
In the case of Chinese shipowners, its expansion has been coupled with the growth of the country as a manufacturing and exporting power in recent decades, and also made possible by state support.
Created in the early 1980s with a significant component of military targets, and sanctioned last year by the United States for its alleged links to the Chinese Army, the aforementioned Chinese colossus CSSC plans to have another megabuke ready for this month. of 400 meters in length and capacity of 23,000 containers.
According to its website, its customers are companies from Germany, Norway, Belgium, Sweden, Hong Kong, Greece, the United States, Japan or France.