Article
Growth in containership sizes to be stopped?
Abstract
Purpose – The increase of containership sizes driven by the need to create greater economies of scale seems to be an endless process. Vessels of more than 21,000 TEU are presently on order. The purpose of this paper is to question whether a positive effect still remains at present mega ship sizes and, even if this was the case, whether such presumably small effect would be outweighed by costly operational impacts for the lines and the ports out of the huge ship sizes. Design/methodology/approach – The effect of increasing ship sizes on the three major cost items in
container shipping have been investigated by extrapolating founded regression curves, applying respective physical laws and referring lumpsum crewing cost (as the major part of the vessel’s running costs) to various ship sizes.