Forecast for the sector development

In view of the macroeconomic outlook, the market research institute Drewry downgraded its forecast for global container throughput and anticipates low growth of 0.8 % for container volumes at the world’s ports in 2023.

For China, the most important shipping region for the Port of Hamburg, Drewry expects only a slight increase of 0.3 % in container throughput in 2023. According to the market research institute, one uncertainty that cannot be gauged in the outlook for China is the end of Beijing’s zero-Covid policy in December 2022. The forecasts for European ports indicate a modest recovery for 2023. Experts estimate a growth rate for the European shipping region of 2.1 % in the current year. This upturn will apply to almost all shipping regions. A slight recovery of 2.1 % is also expected in container throughput for the North-West European ports compared to 2022.

Following the turbulent development caused by the pandemic – and the effects of unusually high freight rates due to high demand with significant capacity and delivery bottlenecks over the past two years in particular – Drewry now expects the container shipping market to gradually return to its old patterns. Contrary to hopes that consolidations and alliances would lead to shipping companies proactively managing their ship capacities before the container market span out of control, it has become clear that the sector only takes cargo capacity into its own hands when forced to do so by severe losses. Now that demand is levelling off and the container shipping situation is easing, the record flood of orders in 2021 and 2022 appears even more extreme. The market research institute AXS Alphaliner expects the fleet’s total carrying capacity to rise to 28.1 million TEU in the forecast period (+8.2 %). In 2023, 362 ships with a carrying capacity of around 2.5 million TEU are scheduled for delivery. Of these, 32 ships will be in the +18,000 TEU category.

Given the easing of demand and a massive expansion of capacities resulting in a further fall in freight rates, Drewry expects lower profitability for shipping companies in 2023. Whereas the sector is thought to have generated US$ 290 billion in 2022, a cumulative operating profit of US$ 15 billion is still expected for 2023.

In view of the continued increase in ship sizes and the resulting rise in container volumes per ship call, the pressure on terminals and hinterland transport systems due to handling peaks will continue to grow. By contrast, the bottlenecks in ports caused by massively disrupted container liner shipping around the world look set to ease. As a result, Drewry expects productivity in ports worldwide to improve noticeably over the coming months.

The most recent medium-term forecast for cargo and passenger transport in Germany issued by the Federal Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure (BMDV) based on data from October 2022 anticipates that the entire German freight market will virtually stagnate in 2023 as a result of the unfavourable macroeconomic outlook (following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the effects on Germany’s macroeconomic development could be neither predicted nor forecast and were therefore not taken into account). However, in terms of traffic performance – transport volume multiplied by distance travelled – experts predict a slight rise of 0.6 %. With regard to the individual modes of transport, a slight decrease of 0.2 % is expected for road freight volume in 2023 while traffic performance is expected to achieve low growth of 0.4 %. The volume of goods transported by rail is set to stagnate. By contrast, railway traffic performance is likely to grow by 1.0 % in 2023. At the same time, intermodal traffic is expected to pick up pace in the current year. Volumes will be up by 2.2 % and performance by 2.7 %.