OOCL loses market share on Asia-EU but soaring rates prop up top line

The impact of soaring spot freight rates made itself felt on OOCL’s top line after the Hong Kong-headquartered carrier published its unaudited second quarter operational update this morning.

The new numbers also appear to show that OOCL may have lost market share on its Asia-Europe services, which in the second quarter registered a year-on-year decline of 17.2%, with three-month liftings on the route recorded at 351,000 teu compared to 424,000 teu in the second quarte of last year.

For the first half of 2024, its Asia-Europe volumes declined 12.5%, from just under 812,000 teu in the first six months of 2023 to 710,000 teu this year.

By way of comparison, Container Trade Statistics (CTS) data for the first five months of the year, shows a 5.6% decline in Asia-Europe volumes, highlighting that OOCL’s volumes have declined by twice as much as the market.

However, revenues on the route have soared – in the second quarter they were 16.4% up year-on-year at $520m, while over the first six months they were up 8.2% to just over $1bn.

Its largest earnings trade was the transpacific, where second quarter revenues increased 42.1% year-on-year to $922m on the back of an 8% increase in volumes to 524,000 teu as well as the beginning of 2024’s year’s contract rates, while first-half revenues grew 27.5% to just under $1.66bn and liftings were up 4.5% to 973,000 teu.

However, its largest trade in terms of volumes remained intra-Asia/Australasia, where it carried 1.745m teu in the first six months of the year, a growth of 9%, but saw revenues over the six-month period on the trade decline by 7.2% to $1.26bn.

It fared much worse on the increasingly flat transatlantic trade, where first-half volumes fell 3.3% and revenues plummeted 43.6% to $309m. However, these declines are largely in line with the CTS price and volume indices for the transatlantic trade, and where pricing has been in a long-term correction after hitting unprecedented highs in late 2022.

Ironically, it OOCL’s decision to replace a series of 8,000 teu vessels with newer 13,000 teu units in October 2022 on a Mediterranean-US east coast service that has been widely blamed the for the subsequent rate collapse from which the trade has yet to recover.

Commenting on its fleet-wide results today, OOCL management said: “For the first six months ended 30 June, total revenues increased by 2.2% and total liftings increased by 2.1% over the same period last year.

“Loadable capacity decreased by 0.7%. The overall load factor was 2.3% higher than the same period in 2023. Average revenue per teu was similar to the same period last year,” it said.