Norddeutsche Reederei H. Schuldt was one of the largest German container shipping companies until it was sold to V. Ships. Now there is not much left.
In recent months, industry leader MSC in particular has bought one ship after another from the fleet managed by V.Ships. Most recently there were four units.
According to broker reports, the Aponte shipping company recently purchased the post-Panamax ships “Northern Javalin” and “Northern Jamboree”. Both were built in Korea by DSME (now Hanwha) and have a capacity of 8,814 TEU. It is likely that the last remaining ship, the “Northern Juvenile”, will also join the Aponte fleet.
V.Ships Germany, based in Hamburg, was formed in 2019 with the acquisition of the fleet of the former North German shipping company H. Schuldt. As part of the transaction, the 35 ships owned by the Norddeutsche Vermögen Group were transferred to the new entity “Northern Shipping Holding”.
Since then, however, more and more ships have been sold, whether to MSC, Maersk or CMA CGM. As a result, they have generally also left the technical management of V.Ships Hamburg. In September last year, the ship manager had already lost 33 ships. What remained were twelve container ships with capacities ranging from 2,500 TEU to 8,800 TEU.
Just the previous week, MSC had broken through another previously unattained sound barrier. With the acquisition of the LNG newbuild “MSC Germany”, it reached the historic size of 900 ships. A further 132 newbuilds are in the order book, so even a future fleet size of 1,000 ships seems realistic.
