Search for ‘container industry’ and what you get is a lot of grim news. ‘Container ship oversupply seen until 2011,’ reports Manila Bulletin. Container shipping line operators have posted large losses since the end of 2008 following the onset of the financial crisis, prompting them to scrap old vessels and idle some of their fleet, it informs. “About 10 per cent of the global container fleet was idled at the end of September.”
Recession rule of thumb number one is that however grim it is in your industry, it is worse in container shipping, observes Jeremy Hillman in http://news.bbc.co.uk, citing the Lex column in the Financial Times. “The container business made a collective profit of £3 billion in 2008, but is estimated to have lost a cool £20 billion in 2009,” he writes, in the narrative about the ‘BBC Box project’ intended to tell ‘the story of the global economy and international trade over the course of a year.’
For a longer account, the recommended read is of Marc Levinson’s ‘The Box’ (www.landmarkonthenet.com), about ‘how the shipping container made the world smaller and the world economy bigger.’ An interesting insight in the book is that though the revolutionary days of container shipping were over by the early 1980s, the box may yet continue to flatten the world.
The author opens by rewinding back to 1956, April 26, when ‘a crane lifted 58 aluminium truck bodies aboard an aging tanker ship moored in Newark, New Jersey. Five days later, the Ideal-X sailed into Houston, where 58 trucks waited to take on the metal boxes and haul them to their destinations. Such was the beginning of a revolution.’
Containers are blamed for many social problems – such as ‘stacks of abandoned containers, too beaten up to use, too expensive to repair, or simply unnneded,’ littering landscapes around the world; or the pollution from containerships and trucks/ trains servicing them; traffic jams in and out of expanding ports; and the security concerns (“a single box, loaded with a radioactive ‘dirty’ bomb timed to explode upon arrival in a major port, could contaminate an entire city and throw international commerce into chaos”).
Levinson notes that the use of containers outfitted with mattresses and toilets to smuggle immigrants are routine, ‘with immigration inspectors unable to detect more than a tiny share of containers with human cargo among the hundreds of thousands of boxes filled with legitimate goods.’
Yet, none of these problems have been a threat to the growth of the container shipping industry, he finds. “Where vessel size had once been limited by the locks in the Panama Canal, containerships had grown so large that twenty-first-century naval architects were constrained by the Straits of Malacca, the busy shipping lane between Malaysia and Indonesia.”
On the lines of ‘Panamax,’ the author foresees that if a containership ever reaches ‘Malacca-Max,’ the maximum size for a vessel able to pass through the straits, it will be a quarter mile long and 190 feet wide, with its bottom some 65 feet below the waterline.
“If it should sink, it will take nearly $1 billion of cargo with it. Its capacity will be 18,000 TEUs, or 9,000 standard 40-foot containers, enough to fill a 68-mile line of trucks each time it arrives in port.”
Where it will call is a serious question, adds Levinson, because few ports anywhere are deep enough to accommodate it. The answer, he suggests, may well be brand-new ports built in deep water offshore, with Malacca-Max ships linking offshore platforms and smaller vessels shuttling containers to land.
“If they ever come about, these enormously costly ships and ports will create yet more economies of scale, making it still cheaper and easier to move goods around the globe,” the author concludes.
