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Tankers
The global crude tanker fleet is getting older and older. You’d have to go all the way back to the year 1988 to find the time when there were fewer crude tanker newbuild deliveries than last year.
In 2024, new crude oil tanker deliveries dropped to a 36-year low as only 17 new tankers, with a capacity of 2.5m dwt, joined the fleet, according to Niels Rasmussen, chief shipping analyst at BIMCO. Compared to 2023, the capacity delivered dropped by 74%.
Combined with low levels of recycling during the past couple of years, the minimal addition of new tonnage has driven the average age of crude tankers to the the highest recorded since 1999, according to BIMCO data.
Greek broker Xclusiv Shipbrokers also has some sobering statistics on the growing vintage state of the tanker fleet.
“Turning into 2025, vessels have added one year to their age, significantly altering the current discussion around fleet age groups,” Xclusiv stated in a new market report.
Xclusiv data shows 18% of the total tanker fleet is now aged 21 years old or older, a 12% increase compared to the same period in 2024. The 16- to 20-year-old tanker age group constitutes 29% of the total tanker fleet, reflecting a 13% increase from January 2024.
In the 2020s to date, the container and LNG sectors have dominated shipyard orderbooks, elbowing out dry bulk and tanker owners from slots at the world’s premier shipbuilders. With fleets ageing rapidly, leading charterers acknowledge they will have to relax their restrictions on chartering older units.
Dry bulk
For the first time, the capesize fleet is carrying more bauxite than coal, according to broker Arrow.
“Volumes from Guinea have surged at the start of the year, whilst panamaxes have been cannibalising capesize coal cargoes. This leaves bauxite as the number two capesize commodity, after iron ore,” Arrow stated in a new report.
China imported 159m tonnes of bauxite last year, up by 18m tonnes over 2023’s total, with 77% of all shipments carried out on capes, according to AXS data.
“This owes not just to Guinea’s emergence as the world’s dominant supplier of the raw material, but also the rising capesize share of Australian bauxite trades in recent years, quadrupling from 2021 to reach 20% last year,” explains a new report from another broker, Braemar.
“Infrastructure improvements in West Africa, led by Guinea and including Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone, and Ghana, are expected to drive further increases in supply for the seaborne market, and especially supply for China,” predicts rival broker BRS who is forecasting exports of the mined product from West Africa to China to increase by another 20m tonnes this year.
“Beijing’s continuous promotion of the ‘New Three’ (namely electric vehicles, lithium batteries, and solar panels) is significantly boosting the demand for aluminium products,” BRS pointed out in its latest weekly dry bulk report.
“Considering the longer voyage distances, the bauxite market is expected to exert an increasing influence on the capesize segment via heightened volatility in the fronthaul route,” BRS concluded.
Containers
Liner owners and operators stand to lose the most amount of profits from the reopening of the Red Sea as the chart below from Jefferies clearly shows.
The Houthis of Yemen have rowed back from attacking merchant shipping following January 19’s historic ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas, potentially bringing an end to the 14-month long Red Sea shipping crisis.
With the Suez Canal potentially coming back into play, analysts at Sea-Intelligence suggest this could lead to rates dropping somewhere between 60 to 70% over a six-month period to levels last seen towards the end of 2023.
In total, Linerlytica estimates suggest up to 7% or 2m teu of the global fleet could be coming back to market once Middle Eastern waters are deemed safe, the Red Sea spelling red ink for much of the liner world.
The post Analyst Abstract appeared first on Energy News Beat.
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