Since this year, newbuilding orders for containership have increased to 1.50m teu with ultra large size focused and this favorable trend is projected to continue in the upcoming year as well.

Hana Daetoo Securities analyst Lee Sang-Woo said that low-ranked operators, such as CSCL, UASC and so on, have kept placing orders for ultra large 18,000 teu boxship this year and Asian or Japanese operators, for instance, EVERGREEN of Taiwan, NYK, MOL of Japan and etc., have shown extremely low weight of large sized ship in their own fleets that prospects for containership orders in 2014 will not be bad.

Lee said, “On December 5, HAPAG-LLOYD of Germany was said to be considering a merger with CSAV of Chile,” and analyzed, “HAPAG is standing at the crossroads of whether to become a large operator which has more than 1m teu tonnages. As a measure for this, it is considered to be mulling over a merger with the medium and small-sized operator.”

Not only this, new orders for large ship are anticipated to grow during upcoming restructurings that large containership orders are expected to stand at a total of 1.20-1.30m teu in 2014 (other forecasted orders are added to actual demands of 680,000 teu), slightly lower than the level recorded this year.

Meanwhile, Hana analyst commented, “Among investment points in Korean Big3 shipbuilders for 2014, the most critical point, expectation towards FLNG order, is still high,” and added, “Thus, shipbuilding industry should be carefully watched, for instance, Hyundai Heavy Industries needs to be considered with containership order while Samsung Heavy Industries, Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering and others with offshore plant.”