Triple-E at the starting dock; debuts in June

With a capacity of 18,000 20-foot containers, the Triple-E will be the largest container ship ever built. It comes at a challenging time though, with weak demand putting strains on all carriers. The first Triple-E vessel (Economy of scale, Energy efficiency and Environmentally improved) will be joining the Maersk Line fleet end of June 2013.

While the focus is on its scale and size, there is much more to it than just that. The Triple-E will consume approximately 35% less fuel per container than the 13,100 TEU vessels being delivered to other container shipping lines in these years. It will also reduce CO2 emissions by more than 50% per container moved, compared to the industry average CO2 performance on the Asia-Europe trade.

Maersk Line is monitoring demand closely and is ready to adjust capacity accordingly to avoid a repetition of the devastating rate wars of some of the previous years. There are a number of ways to do that, including returning chartered vessels to leasing partners, recycling excess tonnage, idling parts of the fleet and further implementing slow steaming.

The cascading of vessels serves another purpose by removing excess capacity and also means that the least efficient and more polluting vessels are pulled out of the network. The plan is to phase in the Triple-E vessels on the AE10 service, which currently calls at 13 different ports in Asia and Northern Europe.