Global revenues soar, but loss of steam for OOCL’s Asia-Europe trade

Hong Kong-headquartered container shipping line OOCL today issued its fourth quarter 2024 operational update, giving the industry the first glimpse of how carriers fared over the last three months.

Total liftings in the fourth quarter amounted to 1,985,990 teu, a 6.1% year-on-year gain on the 1,872,439 teu carried in the fourth quarter of 2023.

Full year liftings for 2024 came in at 7,595,476 teu, a 3.5% rise over 2023 and indicating that OOCL might have lost some market share over last year as industry-wide volume growth is expected to register in the 5%-6% range.

Its capacity in the final quarter grew 4.2% and it said its load factor for the period was 1.5% higher that the fourth quarter of 2023.

However, the were some considerable variations across OOCL’s four trades – transpacific, Asia-Europe, intra-Asia/Australasia and transatlantic – which showed that it was mostly on the Asia-Europe trades where it lost business to competitors.

Fourth-quarter carryings on Asia-Europe declined 6.5% year-on-year to 363,125 teu, while its full-year carryings on the trade were down 10.9% to 1.42m teu compared to full-year 2023.

Meanwhile, its transpacific carryings grew 14.5% in the fourth quarter and 9.9% over the full year, which were largely in line with the market; and intra-Asia remained its largest trade, growing 6.3% in the fourth quarter and 7.3% in the full year to reach 3.6m teu, larger than its transpacific and Asia-Europe volumes combined.

And its fortunes on the transatlantic were turbulent, possibly reflecting front-loading in the final three months – fourth-quarter volumes were up 11.3% while full-year volumes dipped 0.6% over 2023.

Nonetheless, earnings unsurprisingly shot up. OOCL published unaudited fourth quarter revenues of just over $2.5bn, a year-on-year growth of 55% over Q4 2023, while full year revenue growth was a slightly more modest 31% gain, at $9.8bn – indicating that 2024 is likely to be another bumper year for deepsea carriers.

Despite the double-digit volume decline on Asia-Europe, the carrier, which remains 90% owned by Cosco, saw full-year revenues up 44% to $2.3bn, while transpacific revenues grew 53.5% to $3.9bn and intra-Asia annual revenues were up 17% to $3bn.

Transatlantic revenues bucked the trend – while they soared 23% in the fourth quarter compared to the fourth-quarter 2023, for the full-year they were down 26.7% to $616m.