The cost of shipping space on the international shipping route around Africa has increased!

According to the latest ocean intelligence report, under the same conditions, the longer the voyage of the African Rim route, the higher the fuel consumption, and therefore the cost of cabin space will also increase.

This Danish shipping data analysis company stated that assuming these vessels are fully utilized and larger, more energy-efficient vessels are deployed, it should reduce these additional cabin costs.

The analyst pointed out, "If we look at the average ship size in Asia Nordic, we will find moderate fluctuations, but the trend line is almost completely horizontal, which means that the average ship size has not changed."

In the Asia Mediterranean region, there is a clear upward trend, but it started in the second half of 2023, much earlier than the first attack by House in the Red Sea. On the same route, the average vessel size of 2M and the Alliance remained stable, while the vessel size of the Ocean Alliance increased sharply after the first attack in the Red Sea and then decreased to the baseline in early 2023, indicating that these changes were mainly due to network disruptions rather than systemic.

Alan Murphy, CEO of Sea Intelligence, pointed out that "simply observing the average size of a ship is often not enough, as it may be affected by outliers at both ends of the range."

Looking at the median size of ships in Asia and Northern Europe, the median size of a 2M ship is almost entirely in line with the average size of ships. For the Ocean Alliance, we see that the decrease in average vessel size in February 2024 is due to outliers, with no outliers and the average vessel size remaining stable. For THE Alliance, we see a significant deviation between the average vessel size and the median vessel size, which is almost entirely in line with the beginning of the circum African voyage.

Murphy stated that this is due to the shutdown of FE5, as the average size of FE5 vessels is smaller. Murphy emphasized, "This is not directly expanding the deployment of ships to reduce average cabin costs, but under other equal conditions, suspending services can still achieve this goal by removing ships with lower average cabin costs."