UK Shipping Fleet Statistics 2014 show steady decline

19.02.2015

Shipping is a complex international business and many different parties, often based in different countries, may have a commercial interest in a single vessel.

The following chart illustrates four of many ways that the shipping interests of the United Kingdom (UK) might be presented, in each case looking at the deadweight tonnage (dwt – a measure of cargo carrying capacity) of the vessels concerned.


By all four measures – registered, direct owned, parent owned and managed – the UK fleet experienced substantial growth between the late 1990s and 2008/09, when the industry started to feel the impact of the global recession.


Since 2009 there has been a period of decline, with measures falling by between 16 per cent (UK managed ships) and 27 per cent (UK registered ships). The number of UK registered ships is currently at its lowest level since 2006.


Despite the decline in recent years, the UK registered fleet is still four times the size it was in the late 1990s, having increased from 2.7 million dwt to 12.6 million dwt. Over the same period, UK direct owned tonnage more than doubled, from 7.2 million dwt to 16.5 dwt.


United Kingdom Type of Vessels
Different measures of interest in a vessel have different proportions of vessel type, for example container ships accounted for much of the larger share of the UK registered fleet than the UK owned fleet. In 2014, the majority of UK registered fleet comprised of container vessels (60 per cent of deadweight tonnage) and nearly one fifth was accounted for by oil, or oil-chemical tankers (18 per cent). Eleven per cent of UK registered tonnage was formed of bulk carriers.


Approximately one third of UK direct owned deadweight tonnage was formed of container ships (35 per cent), and another third came from bulk carriers. Liquid gas tankers accounted for 13 per cent of the UK direct owned fleet and oil and oil-chemical tankers accounted for 10 per cent.


2. Global comparison
Since 2009 the combined deadweight tonnage of the world fleet has increased by 34 per cent to 1,669.7 million dwt. In comparison the UK fleet has decreased by 27 per cent to 12.6 million dwt. In terms of the number of vessels, the world fleet increased by 5 per cent from 54,125 to 56,759 ships and the UK registered fleet decreased by 36 per cent, from 712 to 453 vessels.


The UK’s share of the world fleet was stable between 1999 and 2008, at around 1 per cent. Since 2009, this has decreased from 1.3 to 0.8 per cent in 2014.


3. Top 10 nations plus UK and Crown Dependencies
In 2014 the UK fleet fell from 16th place to 20th place, in terms of deadweight tonnage, decreasing by 17 per cent. Ships registered in the Crown Dependencies (the Isle of Man, Jersey and Guernsey) remained at 12th place despite tonnage decreasing by 4 per cent over the same period.


Panama remained at the top of the global ranking at the end of 2014, although the deadweight tonnage dropped by 1 per cent compared to 2013. There was little change in the size of the Liberian fleet compared to 2013, and it is still ranked at second place.


The Marshall Islands have seen the biggest increase in the deadweight tonnage of registered vessels over the year (7 per cent).


In 2014, the top 10 nations held 77 per cent of total deadweight tonnage, whilst the UK held less than 1 per cent of total deadweight tonnage.


The main cause for the decrease in the size of the UK fleet was the net impact of ships transferring their registration to other countries, with relatively few ships transferring their registration from elsewhere to the UK.


Of the 19 vessels registered in the UK in 2014, 7 were newly built ships coming into operation for the first time. Vessels were also transferred from Norway, Bermuda, Liberia, Gibraltar, Portugal and the Netherlands.


Singapore, Barbados, Greece, the Marshall Islands, the Isle of Man and China accounted for 80\% of the total deadweight tonnage transferred out of United Kingdom. This accounted for 28 vessels out of the total 66 de-flagged vessels.


The most common country to which ships transferred to was Singapore, which accounted for 2.4 million of the deadweight tonnage transferring from the UK to other countries.


The overall net decrease in 2014 was 47 vessels or 2.6 million deadweight moved from the UK register.
4. Red Ensign Group


The Red Ensign Group registered trading vessel fleet has been increasing since 1999. Of the three regions comprising the Red Ensign Group, the UK had the smallest fleet in 1999 at 2.7 million dwt, compared to the Crown Dependency fleet of 7.0 million dwt and the Overseas Territory fleet of 13.0 million dwt.


The UK fleet was smaller than that of the Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies until 2007. In 2009, the size of the UK fleet exceeded those of the Crown Dependencies and the Overseas Territories. However, diverging trends in recent years mean that the Crown Dependencies fleet increased between 2009 and 2014 from 287 to 342 vessels or from 15.7 to 24.2 million deadweight tonnage and is now nearly twice the size of the UK fleet.
Shipping Fleet Statistics 2014


Source: UK Department Of Transport

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