OOCL takes off the gloves
Under the aegis of its new parent company Cosco Shipping, OOCL has returned to its original strategy with a slight delay. Five new 23,000 teu vessels are being built by 2023 on the Chinese mainland, near Shanghai.
It’s never too late. The ink has hardly dried on new contracts signed by the Hong Kong-based carrier OOCL with the shipyards Nantong Cosco KHI Ship Engineering and Dalian Cosco KHI Ship Engineering for five giant containership newbuildings. Each of the ships, which costs USD 155.7 million a piece, will offer the shipping line the capacity to carry another 23,000 teu. The units are due to be delivered in 2023.
OOCL’s fleet already includes six huge G class vessels today, with a capacity to carry approximately 21,000 teu each. These ships were ordered in March 2015, and represented the first step in OOCL’s expansion into this class of huge freighters for services in the trade between Asia and Europe. OOCL’s original plan had been to order a second batch of six ULCVs. This extension of the original order was ditched in the wake of the shipping crisis of 2016 and the subsequent phase of the sale of the OOIL Group to Cosco Shipping in 2017 and 2018. Now it has been revived as a quintet.
