Containerized Marine Transportation is one of the most capacious types of shipping in the world, which accounts for more than 90% of the global turnover of general piece cargoes.
Containerized Marine Transportation is one of the most capacious types of shipping in the world, which accounts for more than 90% of the global turnover of general piece cargoes.
The first voyage of the container ship Gateway City was made back in 1957 in the US, having marked the beginning of containerization of cargo shipments. The first ever international container ship journey was made in 1966 with 236 containers on board.
Today, the capacity of the global container fleet is estimated at 24.22 million TEUs. TEU is the adopted measure of container turnover, which equals to a standard 20-foot container with a capacity of 33 cubic meters (m3). Total global sea container shipping in the first quarter of 2021 reached 42.7 million in TEU, which is 10.3% more when comparing the data from the last year.
Top 10 container lines as of 2020 is as follows (company name, year of establishment, market share, total vessels, TEU fleet capacity) are presented below:
- Maersk (Denmark, 1928, 16.6%, 651, 3.944 million).
- MSC (Switzerland, 1970, 15.7%, 560, 3.736 million).
- The COSCO Group (China, 1961, 12.3%, 480, 2.930 million).
- CMA CGM Group (France, 1977, 11.5%, 505, 2.729 million).
- Hapag-Lloyd (Germany, 1970, 7.2%, 236, 1.707 million).
- ONE (Japan, 2017, 6.5%, 212, 1.549 million).
- Evergreen Line (Taiwan, 1968, 5.1%, 190, 1.226 million).
- HMM (South Korea, 1976, 2.5%, 67, 603 thousand).
- Yang Min Marine (Taiwan, 1972, 2.5%, 90, 597 thousand).
- PIL (Singapore, 1967, 1.5%, 109, 348 thousand).
