Toft: Ocean Speeds Will Go Down as Bunker Prices, Vessel Sizes Grow

Sailing speeds will decrease, as bunker prices continue to increase together with average vessel sizes, Soren Toft, Executive Vice President of A.P. Møller – Mærsk A/S, said today in the company’s conference call on business results.

Slow steaming has been identified across the shipping industry as one of the key measures to cut costs and save fuel, especially upon the entrance into force of 2020 sulphur cap. This is even more important for ultra large containerships whose engines have far greater capacity than smaller ships or those dominating other shipping sectors.

The container shipping sector has been slow steaming for the past 10 years, particularly on long trade routes like those connecting Asia and Europe.

“We have solved one of the two issues we’ve had with the reliability of our services with speed reduction. One of the issues was relative precision in the industry, the other one was nominal delivery to our customers. We are not satisfied with what we are delivering to our customers, and there is a very good correlation between improving that and reducing sailing speed and becoming more reliable,” Toft said.

As revealed, Maersk Line and Hamburg Süd managed to maintain top positions in the industry when it comes to reliability despite the overall worsening of reliability in the industry in the third quarter of the year.

World Maritime News Staff