All major shipping lines that report on their financial figures have recorded sharp year-on-year revenue drops in the third quarter of 2023.

Sea Intelligence said in a new report that, in fact, the smallest contraction was -51.8%.

"While this does sound alarming, we have to remember that the Y/Y comparison is against a period of high rates," it added.

To counter this volatility, the report opted to compare 2023-Q3 against 2019 on an annualised basis.

"We see that the contraction in 2023-Q3 is an artefact of the abnormal growth in 2021-2022, and the revenues are now really only dropping down to the pre-pandemic levels," commented Alan Murphy, CEO of Sea-Intelligence.

 Figure 1 gives an overview of the EBIT/TEU. [Source: Sea-Intelligence]

Murphy pointed out that after the extraordinary highs of 2021-2022, in 2023- Q3, EBIT/TEU dropped in line with the pre-pandemic years.

The report noted that COSCO has been doing well, recording the largest EBIT/TEU of US$289/TEU, followed by Hapag-Lloyd with US$64/TEU and HMM with US$52/TEU.

Maersk recorded the smallest negative EBIT/TEU of -US$4/TEU, whereas ZIM recorded a significant negative EBIT/TEU of -US$2,625/TEU (with an EBIT loss of US$2.28 billion).

However, it added that for ZIM, a large part of this is driven by a "non-cash impairment loss of US$2.06 billion."