South Korean container ship operator HMM, formerly known as Hyundai Merchant Marine, has christened its most recent vessel completed by compatriot builder Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering (see Pacific Maritime Magazine, Feb 2020). Now the largest container ship in the world, the 399.9-meter by 61-meter HMM Algeciras has a capacity of 23,964 TEUs compared with the 23,656 TEU-capacity of Mediterranean Shipping Company’s MSC Gülsünclass, formerly the world’s largest.
The new mega-ship enters service at an inauspicious time as hundreds of box ships are now being laid up around the globe and sailings canceled because of COVID-19.
Unless contracts are re-negotiated HMM, which changed its name in April following a complete separation from South Korea’s Hyundai Group, plans to take delivery of another six 24,000-TEU container ships from Daewoo and five sister ships from Samsung Heavy Industries plus a further eight 16,000-TEU vessels from Hyundai Heavy Industries before the third quarter of next year.
