All major shipping lines that report financial results have recorded sharp YoY revenue drops in Q32023. “In fact, the smallest contraction was of -51.8 percent,” according to the latest report by Sea-Intelligence. “While this does sound alarming, we have to remember that the YoY comparison is against a period of high rates.
“To counter this volatility, we instead compare Q32023 against 2019 on an annualised basis , and see that the contraction in Q3 is an artefact of the abnormal growth in 2021-2022. The revenues are now really only dropping to the pre-pandemic levels.
“Figure 1 gives an overview of the EBIT/TEU. After the extraordinarily highs of 2021-2022, in Q32023, we see EBIT/TEU drop in line with the pre-pandemic years.”
COSCO has been doing well, recording the largest EBIT/TEU of $289 followed by Hapag-Lloyd with $64 and HMM with $52. Maersk recorded the smallest negative EBIT/TEU of $4 whereas ZIM recorded a significant negative EBIT/TEU of $2,625 (with an EBIT loss of $2.28 billion). For ZIM, a large part of this is driven by a non-cash impairment loss of $2.06 billion, the update added.