Mega Trend, Mega Container Ship

Land divides, but sea unites! Over the last one and a half century, world population has risen from 1.3 billion in 1850 to 6.4 billion in 2004 at about 1% average annual growth. In addition, trade in merchandise and unfinished goods increases faster than the world’s GDP and so does the demand for maritime transport services, since shipping is the cheapest mode of transport has fulfilled the need for exchange of goods between various nations, taking the advantage of differences in their natural resources, cost of production and surplus supplies to feed, clothe and provide daily necessities of life to the rising world population. World sea trade has grown from 50 million to 6.2 billion tones over this period at 3.2% growth, nearly 3 times that of population. Seaborne trade is about 90% of world trade. It’s seaborne trade that provides life blood to the global industry.

The seaborne trade might not be able to do was not possible without massive innovations in shipbuilding and naval architecture or marine engineering. As far as general cargo shipping is concerned, major change started with McLean’s first trial run of Ideal X, a converted tanker, in April 1956 in the form of containerization. The development of containerization since then is nothing but impressive. Even more impressive is the evolution and growth in the size of fully cellular purpose-built containership that arrived on the scene in 1968.The maximum size of containership has reached from a mere 58 trailers on the spar deck in 1956 to 9,000+ TEU ships nowadays. The story continues. There are now on the drawing board designs of bigger and bigger containerships, we can expect to welcome: The Korean design of 10,000TEU, the British Lloyd’s ULCS and the French BV’s Verimax of 12,500TEU, the Hyundai’s Germanischer Lloyd design of 13,000TEU, the Maersk’s design of 15,000TEU, the Dutch Malacca Max of 18,000 TEU.

There will be only a few numbers of ports used by these mega ships. They are not meant for each and every port in the world. Which ports will be chosen by these ships? Which ports are likely to succeed competing for them? There have been the biggest and latest super cars in most Indonesian wealthiest people’s garages. Yet, it appears that Indonesian ports will not house those mega container ships.