Gone are the days of trying to appeal to all customers at all times on a ‘swings and roundabout’ basis, particularly those wanting to reduce the number of service providers employed, and in has come more careful transpacific cargo selection.
This has mainly involved the three carriers cutting out those West Coast North America ports where insufficient demand exists for big ships, or access to big ships is restricted because of physical limitations. So, it is OK if you want to go directly to Los Angeles, Long Beach or Oakland, but not so good if you want to go to Seattle, Vancouver, Prince Rupert, Portland or Tacoma. Maersk Line and CMA CGM do have a joint pendulum service from Asia to Seattle (returning via Vancouver), but with a limited port-pair range. Up and coming ports such as Lazaro Cardenas in Mexico also appear to be in favour.
And, as in the Asia-Europe tradelane, the three also appear reluctant to share their economies of scale with anyone else. Slot charters apart, CMA CGM mainly partners MSC, and Maersk mainly shares vessels with MSC and CMA CGM.
The end result is that, compared to a combined market share of just 22% of all effective eastbound transpacific vessel capacity deployed in April (i.e. after deduction of space for wayport cargo etc), the average size of vessel deployed by the three carriers (8,550 teu) was a massive 32% higher than the tradelane norm of 6,490 teu. CMA CGM’s (8,822 teu) was a hefty 36% more, MSC’s (8,712 teu) was 34% greater and Maersk Line’s (8,108 teu) was 25% higher (see chart below).