This could easily have gone on SteMis' excellent Hellenic Carriers thread entitled 'Recovery in World Trade in 2011' but probably deserves its own thread as it concerns containers ships rather than bulk carriers.
Please also excuse the thread's opening link to a Daily Mail article ! I will add others when I see them.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1212013/Revealed-The-ghost-fleet-recession.html
This melodramatic article highlights the fact 500 ships are anchored offshore Malaysia with no cargo or crew, and simply have no charters, when historically they would now be moving cargo ahead of Christmas.
Here, on a sleepy stretch of shoreline at the far end of Asia, is surely the biggest and most secretive gathering of ships in maritime history. Their numbers are equivalent to the entire British and American navies combined; their tonnage is far greater. Container ships, bulk carriers, oil tankers - all should be steaming fully laden between China, Britain, Europe and the US, stocking camera shops, PC Worlds and Argos depots ahead of the retail pandemonium of 2009.
This is why the chilliest financial winds anywhere in the City of London are to be found blowing through its 400-plus shipping brokers. Between them, they manage about half of the world's chartering business. The bonuses are long gone. The last to feel the tail of the economic whiplash, they - and their insurers and lawyers - await a wave of redundancies and business failures in the next six months. Commerce is contracting, fleets rust away - yet new ship-builds ordered years ago are still coming on stream. The cost of sending a 40ft steel container of merchandise from China to the UK has fallen from £850 plus fuel charges last year to £180 this year. The cost of chartering an entire bulk freighter suitable for carrying raw materials has plunged even further, from close to £185,000 ($300,000) last summer to an incredible £6,100 ($10,000) earlier this year.
'The prospects for shipyards are bleak, particularly for the South Koreans, where they have a high proportion of foreign orders. 'So far the shipyards are continuing to work, but the problems will start to emerge next year and certainly in 2011, because that is when the current orders will have been delivered. There have hardly been any new orders in the past year. In 2011, the shipyards will simply run out of ships to build.'
