Now, due to the gradual improvement of the epidemic situation, the shipping industry has recovered greatly, and traders in many countries have started their work. Ships on the sea are in close contact with each other, and many ports are very busy.

It is precisely because of this upsurge that the container ship market is very hot now. Liner companies basically have no ships available for charter to provide to carriers, so the price of second-hand ships rises rapidly.

This makes many carriers feel headache, so they come up with a way - is to speed up the transportation, so that a container ship can transport more things within the specified time. This is a disguised increase in transport capacity.

Although the fuel cost is also very high now, it is more cost-effective compared with the rise of ship price.

Taking Los Angeles port of the United States to South China port as an example, according to the data of ship positioning system, the speed of ships between Los Angeles port and South China port in the past was less than 15 knots, but now it has reached 22 knots. It can be seen that the shortage of ships has a great impact on the shipping industry.

The chief executive of eesea, a shipping data provider, said, "originally, shipping companies advocated slow driving because of the fuel cost. Now, with the increase of freight and ship price, anything can happen.

The reason why ships speed up the voyage

"In the past, when carriers began to slow down, or even super slow speed, it was mainly driven by high fuel prices."

But these are not normal times. The current market schedule is far behind, faster speed can help carriers reduce the loss of capacity caused by congestion over time.

Theoretically speaking, in the face of current congestion, increasing ship speed will bring more cargo transportation. As the current freight rate is at a high level, increasing the speed can increase the number of flights to transport within the specified time.

Some people have indicated that the carrier has been pursuing the improvement of speed, but in fact, we have no real global ship shortage. 

The reason why we have the shortage is that many ports are congested, most of the ships are blocked in the ports, which reduces the transport capacity and the number of ships available for transportation“

Another reason is the nature of container transport. In contrast, the transportation of dry bulk cargo and oil tanker is not so difficult. 

If the speed of general cargo ships or bulk carriers is increased by 5%, a new effective capacity of 5% will be created. Container ships can not achieve this effect.

The shippers and carriers should make timely decisions to cope with the current difficulties of insufficient ship price and transportation capacity.