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Tankers As the year ends, one of the persistent themes of 2023 in tankers is making headlines again, namely the shadow/dark/grey/opaque fleet. Analysts at Vortexa issued a recent report showing that tankers operating in opaque markets reached a record high in Q2 and have since declined. Vortexa data suggests that 1,649 unique tankers have operated in the opaque market from January 2021 to the middle of November. Tankers in the Russian trade account for 75% of the opaque fleet, according to Vortexa. Also studying what it terms as the grey fleet has been French broker BRS. Excluding PDVSA of Venezuela and chemical tankers, BRS assesses the grey tanker fleet today stands at 675 ships, equating to 7.4% of the global tanker fleet. Tankers still working above 20 years of age made up just 1% of the global tanker fleet pre-covid and were still a rarity at 3% before the invasion of Ukraine in late February last year. They’re now on track to make up 11% of all tanker demand by mid-2025, according to data from brokers Braemar. Dry Bulk As happens in the tanker trades too, larger ships’ volatile gyrations caught the headlines this month with capesize rates going on a rollercoaster ride, but lower down the vessel size classes there have been some interesting developments. Handysizes enjoyed the past week’s best performance among the dry bulk segments. The Baltic Exchange’s indicator for them advanced by 12.8% last week, bringing the gains for the past four weeks to nearly 50% “Over the past few weeks, tonnage supply in the Atlantic and the Pacific has been on the rise. Last week's increase saw vessel availability in the three principal basins rise above the average for the year, but not excessively,” an update from Shipfix noted, going on to predict that weaker order volumes and increasing vessel availability in the final week of the year will likely contribute to a decline in spot freight rates in the near term. “Should last year’s pattern repeat itself, global aggregate cargo volumes could drop by around 50 per cent between now and the end of the year,” Shipfix pointed out. Looking ahead, the supply/demand picture for handies looks very favourable. In 2022, net fleet growth for handysize bulkers of 20,000 to 40,000 dwt was +1.7% year-on-year according to Banchero Costa. The Italian broker is forecasting net fleet growth to continue at around 1.7% in 2023 and then at around 1.3% in 2024. Containers In liner shipping, the spot market tends to bring pressure on the direction contract rates take. However, market participants have been warned that this pattern has come under stress in the 2020s. Sea-Intelligence has studied the recent instances where spot and total rates have decoupled, noting in the company’s most recent weekly report: “The pandemic and post-pandemic period has led to a large degree of decoupling in the timing between changes in spot and contract rates from a global perspective.” The period 2020-2023 has not only been disruptive in terms of rate levels but has also on two separate occasions spotted by Sea-Intelligence materially changed the relationship between spot and total rate levels in the market. Over at John McCown-led Blue Alpha Capital, meanwhile, analysts like to focus on the data from Container Trades Statistics (CTS), which has both contract and spot rates, arguing it is the most relevant actual pricing measure based on all loads that move and results from data provided by all of the carriers. “The best factual information on overall container shipping pricing comes from the CTS data and other aggregate measures of all the actual loads moving. The credibility of spot indices in the container sector should be taken with a grain of sea salt,” McCown wrote in a recent report, arguing that the best approach in order to understand pricing in the container shipping sector is to view spot rates and contract rates separately and to focus on the latter as the truest measure with regard to the level and trend of real pricing.

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