Somewhere in a shipyard office, a container line is signing contracts for ships that will not arrive until 2029 and will not retire until the 2050s.

Nobody knows what container trade will look like by then. Hapag-Lloyd CEO Rolf Habben Jansen has put dates and numbers to the risk of the fleet growing faster than the cargo it carries.

Boards weighing a newbuild order should read it before the next yard meeting.

Rolf Habben Jansen runs a company with a fair number of ships on order. That gives his reading of the container ship order book its weight. He is a buyer saying out loud when he thinks the buying will start to hurt.

His dates are specific. Next year looks safe, with about 8% of new capacity arriving against trade growth of 5% or more on the main routes. In 2028, that figure rises to approximately 12%, and he rates the odds of demand absorbing all of it at under 50%.

The problem underneath is an old one in shipping. Owners commit to assets expected to operate for 25 to 30 years on the strength of demand trends that are two or three years old. The order book has reached about 45% of the fleet because the last three years were strong. Nobody ordering now can say what the next three will bring, and Habben Jansen did not pretend otherwise.

What he did say is that the cushions are in owners’ own hands. Ships can slow by a knot or more. Old tonnage can go for recycling. Both are true, yet both rely on owners acting together when rates fall. Scrapping has run at half a per cent of the fleet a year for a decade. Getting that to 4% means owners of 25-year-old ships accepting that those vessels are finished, and few do so early.

Ship managers and tonnage providers sit closest to the risk. Charters fixed in a tight market will come up for renewal just as the 2028 and 2029 deliveries land. Older and thirstier ships will be first in line for lay-up.

Then there is fuel. Most owners are choosing LNG. Hapag-Lloyd’s own first LNG conversion ran from a planned US$25 million and 60 days to US$43 million and 125 days, so a wrong call at the yard is expensive to correct. Habben Jansen also expects nuclear propulsion to be a real option for large ships around 2040. That date falls well inside the working life of anything ordered now.

Owners are betting on demand and on fuel in the same contract. Only one of those bets can be adjusted after delivery, and the 2028 delivery schedule is already fixed.

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