Perishables trade within Asia will be the main driver of growth in the reefer market in 2015, according to Michel Looten, maritime director of Seabury Group.

“Intra-Asia is fairly stable and has actually picked up quite a bit in the last quarter,” said Looten, who was speaking at the first Cool Logistics Asia conference in Hong Kong, during a session on global and Asian shipping trends in the perishables business. “Intra-Asia is the biggest trade of them all, so that’s actually good news in general for people involved in the shipping industry.”

Going into more detail, Looten said that 43% of all perishable cargo exports originated from China, but noted that China-Asia trade lanes, along with many intra-Asia ones, are already highly containerized.

“In that respect, there’s not going to be a huge portion of business that you can win back from the conventional global reefer operators,” he said. “The potential exceptions to that are exports to Malaysia and Vietnam. For Vietnam, it will mostly be short-distance trades and not something that requires a lot of additional equipment over tonnage. China to Malaysia might offer some opportunities for additional containerization.”

In terms of the commodities involved in intra-Asia reefer trade, garlic occupied the largest share of the market, followed by potatoes, cuttlefish, bovine meat, mackerel and cabbage. Citrus fruits and poultry offer the most interesting prospects for containerization growth, according to Looten.

Opportunities within Asia in the perishables market could help alleviate some of the difficulties facing many shipping lines.

CMA CGM’s reefer business unit, for example, which has a fleet of approximately 200,000 reefers, loaded a total of 821,000 TEUs last year. This means that, on average, it fills its reefer containers with reefer cargo less than five times a year, according to Lars Kastrup, senior vice president of Asia at CMA CGM.

“This is one of the challenges that we, along with the whole industry, have,” said Kastrup. “We don’t use our equipment well enough.”

CMA CGM sees the reefer trade growing at 6.5% per year, as opposed to the slowing growth rate of conventional containerization. By 2018, more than 80% of all sea-borne traffic could be carried by reefer containers, which underlines the importance of this market.

“As carriers, we do realise that we have a responsibility to continue to develop the reefer business,” said Kastrup. “We, together with the industry, still need to work on innovation and creativity to offer new products, and we look forward to that.”

By Jeffrey Lee

Asia Cargo News | Hong Kong