The Financial and Economic Crisis, Its Impacts on the Shipping Industry, Lessons to Learn: The Container-Ships Market Analysis

Abstract

The container shipping, the important beneficiary and the major element of globalization, has remained a way of moving goods all over the world at an ever-increasing pace since not long ago. With China becoming the world’s factory, the industry has known a sustained and rapid growth from year to year. Many among ship owners, bankers, and investors during this period of boom in the shipping industry, become very rich. The availability of cash, with the construction of more technologically advanced ships, with the expansion of ports and the introduction of new shipping services, the cargo capacity in terms of twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU) of the world container fleet, had more than tripled between the years 2000-2009, reaching 12.5 million. But now, the well-known global financial and economic crisis of 2009 had almost overnight suppressed the growth of the container-ships market. In fact, for the first time in the history of the maritime industry, growth has stopped and there is even a steady decline in the rate of containers shipped around the world. In the first six months of the year of the crisis alone, the shipping industry declined by close to 16% causing huge losses.