The world's largest liner company, Mediterranean Shipping (MSC), has recently re-built ships on a large scale, and its capacity has continued to grow. According to a number of foreign media reports, MSC has ordered 20 liquefied natural gas (LNG)-powered dual-fuel container ships at China New Era Shipbuilding Co., Ltd. ship, the capacity has increased by nearly 200,000 TEU.

Since the beginning of this year, MSC has made frequent moves to expand its capacity, which also coincides with the company's long-term strategy of focusing on traditional container shipping business. In April this year, MSC signed an agreement with New Era Shipbuilding to order 14 LNG-powered container ships, with a transaction value of more than 1.68 billion US dollars. Shortly after that, MSC signed a contract with South Korea's Hyundai Heavy Industries to order six LNG-powered container ships with a capacity of 7,900TEU.

In addition to newbuildings, MSC has also set its sights on the charter and second-hand market. Just a week ago, some media reported that MSC and three Japanese shipowners had reached a long-term charter agreement for four 23,000TEU vessels. In addition, in February this year, MSC purchased four Panamax container ships from Sinokor Merchant Marine, South Korea's largest unlisted shipowner, at a transaction price of US$350 million.

According to Sinokor Merchant Shipping, it spent a total of 46.7 million US dollars to purchase these four ships, and the price of resale to MSC was as high as 350 million dollars, which was more than 7 times the purchase price. Some people in the industry once said that this is enough to prove the "crazy" of the container shipping market, so that the liner companies buy ships at all costs.

According to Alphaliner's statistics, in January this year, MSC's shipping capacity surpassed that of Maersk, ranking first in the global shipping capacity list for the first time, and also has the world's largest number of newbuilding orders. MSC's new ship orders alone are comparable to Hapag-Lloyd's fleet. As of today (June 21, 2022), MSC's total capacity is 678 ships and 4,427,052 TEU, and it has 113 ordered ships and 1,463,978 TEU. The order capacity accounts for 33.1% of the existing capacity.

In March this year, Soren Toft, CEO of MSC, said in a video meeting with Zhao Chongjiu, Vice Minister of Transportation of China, that the Chinese market has played a very important role in the rapid growth of MSC's business, and MSC attaches great importance to the Chinese market. In order to meet the growing import and export demand in the Chinese market, MSC has opened a number of routes from China to the West America, and at the same time, vigorously carried out sea-rail combined transportation services in the Chinese market.

Shenzhen Xunlaitong specializes in shipping export from Shenzhen to Australia & New Zealand, Germany, Netherlands and more business

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