Taipei: Evergreen Line, Taiwan’s top box player, aims to head back up the global liner rankings into fourth place via its recent chartering deal with Greece’s Enesel for ten 13,800 teu ships. The vessels, to be built at Korea’s Hyundai Heavy Industries, will also allow the Chang Yung-fa-controlled firm to cross the 1m teu mark in terms of fleet size. Evergreen is believed to be paying in the region of $50,000 a day for the 13,800 teu ships, considerably less than most of its peers.
Evergreen also has twenty 8,000 teu ships under construction at Korea’s Samsung Heavy Industries for delivery through to 2015 and another ten similarly sized ships being built at CSBC in Kaohsiung. Evergreen currently ranks fifth in the world with a fleet size of 668,000 teu.
A decade ago only Maersk was bigger than Evergreen, but since then aggressive expansion plans by Europe’s MSC and CMA CGM in particular saw Evergreen slip down the rankings. [06/07/12]
