John Nikolaou News

The shipping industry is experiencing the biggest dry bulk market recession since the 1980s, as uncertain global economic outlook and increased imbalance between supply and demand have lead to historically low freight rates .It seems the downturn will continue until 2017 if a viable equilibrium is not achieved. The recent measures in 2013 which promoted the replacement of older tonnage with newer, in combination with the Chinese financial backing, provided to shipowners resulted in a large orderbook that made freight market to perform at very low rate levels.

Greek shipowners have returned to the top of the global shipping economy by controlling a gross tonnage of 164 million tons, overtaking the Japanese on 159.4 million tons. According to Clarksons, this global lead illustrates that Greeks operate much bigger ships because they own 4,984 vessels against 8,537 managed by the Japanese and 6,427 by the Chinese. Japanese have invested huge funds during the past decade which resulted in significant losses during the crisis, while Greeks proved to be more conservative during the period of industry growth and had less negative impact on them. In addition Greeks are seemed to be very active in vessel acquisitions as they have spent more than $6,8bn during Q1 2014.