Carriers prioritize East-West routes

Intra-regional and Africa trade capacity drops as carriers prioritize lucrative East-West routes

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The cellular liner fleet grew 4.5% in 2021 to reach 24.97 Mteu on 1 January 2022.

This growth was not evenly spread across all trades, however. On the contrary, last year witnessed a massive shift in capacity towards lucrative East-West routes at the expense of regional traffic within Asia and Europe and also capacity deployed on Africa-related services.

At the start of this year, 22% of the total cellular fleet was deployed between Asia and North America, up from 17.5% on 1 January 2021.

Carriers added 1.30 Mteu of capacity to this major East-West route over the course of last year, which represents a staggering 31.2% increase.

Source: Alphaliner