Container shipping has achieved unprecedented growth in this millennium’s first quarter!

In a look back at 25 years of container shipping, Alphaliner has illustrated how the fleet has grown and how the set-up of the top ocean carriers has changed.

While the industry as such has been around since 1956, when the converted oil tanker IDEAL X was turned into the world’s first container ship and set sail on a US domestic trip from Newark to Houston, it has been the last 25 years that have seen the sector achieve unprecedented growth.

Within the time of one ship’s commercial life, about 25 years, the once modest container fleet has ballooned from 4.5 Mteu to 33.6 Mteu today.

Organic growth and a wave of consolidation in the 2010s have moved a whopping 84% of global ship capacity into the hands of the Top 10 carriers, compared to 61% at the start of the millennium.

Over the past quarter of a century, the number of ships has seen a net increase from 2,622 to 7,492. Average vessel size therewith went up from ca. 1,700 to about 4,500 teu.

At close to 11.0 Mteu (the exact number depends upon when some ‘orders’ are counted as firm), today’s newbuilding pipeline alone is more than twice as big as the world fleet was in 2000.

Alphaliner data shows that the world fleet has grown in an almost linear way from 2003 to 2023, with net capacity increases of about 1 Mteu per year, or 20 Mteu over 20 years.

Over the course of the last two years, however, fleet growth has accelerated notably, with well over 2 Mteu per year injected into the liner fleet, as per the Alphaliner analysis.