The Q2 financial reporting season in liner shipping beats the expectations. Many in the industry are taken aback by the container lines' ability to »make more from less« during the pandemic. Although cargo volumes plunged by two-digit percentages during the second quarter, liner operators presented the best quarterly earnings in quite some time, with Hapag-Lloyd right at the forefront with its core EBIT margin (EBI17 turnover) of 11.7%! Even notoriously loss-making carriers such as Hyundai and ZIM have turned a corner. Browsing the columns of the profit & loss accounts of container lines makes you forget that these are »unprec-edented« bad times... Perhaps for the first time in history -certainly after the end of the »conference« system more than a decade ago - liner operators are savouring the benefits of consistent and unrelenting capacity management. Blank sailings, service suspensions and scal- ing-down of vessel sizes on a number of loops took active route capacity down to level with or even below cargo demand.
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