b'2American Journal ofTransportation ajot.comContainership operatorsOCEAN CARRIER peak on a historic waveIn 2021 containership operators rode a historic waveREVIEW 2022to record profits. It was like the 100-year wave, - a once in a generation event generated by a concen-tration of ships and slots in few hands and pent-up consumer demand. But persistent problems in the supply chain have sparked new OSRA legis-lation and in the shipping industry what goes up usually comes down. By George Lauriat, AJOTSlot machine.with the addition of some of Inthemodernhistoryofthenewbuildingsanddrop-mercantileshippingneverpingofsomecharterhires. hassomuchtonnage,soBut with a healthy number of many slots, and so much car- ships coming down the slip-ryingpower,residedinsoways, MSC stands to cement few ocean carrier companies.itspositionastheworlds Simply put, the ownership oflargest containership operator thecontainercarrierfleetisin the upcoming years.heavily tilted towards the top.Anothercarriercarrying IntheAJOTsTop50a big orderbook is Evergreen Containership Ocean Carriers(PEAKcontinued on (see chart on page 8) derivedpage 8)from Alphalinerfigures,the Top Tencontainershipoper-atorsdominatetheentire industry. Just how dominant arethetopten?Theentire cellularfleetcontainsjust over 25 million TEU and the Top Ten carriers account for 21.5 million of that total, or around 86% of the slot capac-ity.Andtheindustrydomi-nance isnt likely to end soon astheorderbookforcon-tainershipsisalsoweighted heavilyatthetopwith368 ships of over 4.5 million TEU on order. More importantly is the collaborativeadvantageat the top. Nine of the top ten carriersareinoneofthe threealliances.(SeeAlli-ancestoryonpage4) And Zim,whichholdsthetenth slot on the list, has an agree-ment with the 2M Alliance.Inlookingatthetopliner shippingcompanies,theascen-dancyofMediterraneanShip-pingCorp(MSC)tothe number one position (in terms of capacity) over fellow 2M Alliance partner Maersk, isnt really that much of a surprise. MSC has been steadily grow-ing over the last decade and thetwocarriershavebeen jockeyingforthetopspot for a few years now. What is interesting about the flip flop atthetopisthenumberof ships that MSC has on order. Privatelyheld,theGeneva-based MSC largely has grown organically whereas most of thetopcarriersexperienced significantgrowththrough the M&A splurge that imme-diatelyfollowedtheHanjin bankruptcy in 2017. MSChas77boxships onorderofalmost1.2mil-lion TEU capacity, easily the largest orderbook of any car-rier. The company also has a charteredtotalof339ships of2.63million TEUcapac-ity,thelargestofanycar-rier.Undoubtedly,someof the chartered tonnage will be converted to owned column'