Container Supply Review World Shipping Council（集装箱供应回顾世界航运协会）.pdf

Container Supply Review May 2011 Today, the number of ocean shipping containers in use in the global fleet of container equipment is roughly 18.605 million units or 28.535 million TEU.1 The issue of sufficient container equipment availability arises in various contexts, but there are few overall analyses of what factors are most relevant to whether supply is constrained or ample. This World Shipping Council (WSC) paper seeks to provide a summary of the factors that influence the size and use of the global container equipment fleet, and the current status of the aggregate supply compared to demand. This paper seeks to address the question from a global container supply perspective. It does not seek to address specific regional or local container imbalances, which may result where, for example, exports in a particular region may face a container shortage because there are relatively few containerized imports that come to that area, and thus empty containers must be repositioned on the basis of a sufficient forecasted certainty and at a price that justifies the repositioning of the equipment to such an area. This paper concludes that equipment supply will be tight during the 2011 peak shipping season, and that proper planning and forecasting by shippers and carriers will be important to manage through times of constrained equipment supply. BACKGROUND The global recession of 2009 was felt deeply in the container manufacturing sector, which had seen demand for new containers average in excess of 3 million TEU a year for the previous five years. In 2009, however, world container production of