Following seven Arctic container voyages in 2023 and more than a dozen voyages in 2024, China’s private shipping company NewNew Shipping Line is preparing to expand its fleet to expand its business on the Northern Sea Route.
According to foreign media reports, as part of a Sino-Russian joint venture, NewNew Shipping Line is planning to build five Arc7 ice-class container ships. The ships will be deployed on the Arctic route connecting the Chinese ports of Shanghai and Ningbo with St. Petersburg and Arkhangelsk. An official from Atomflot, a nuclear-powered icebreaker company under Rosatom, announced the cooperation at a shipping forum in St. Petersburg.
According to NewNew Shipping Line, at the 27th St. Petersburg International Economic Forum held in June 2024, Russian Rosatom subsidiaries and NewNew Shipping Line signed an agreement to organize year-round container shipping routes between Chinese and Russian ports using the Northern Sea Route. The two sides plan to establish a joint shipbuilding enterprise to design and build high-ice-class container ships and jointly manage international container shipping routes.
Xinxin Shipping Line is said to operate several no and lower ice class ships that can cross the Arctic region via the Arctic Ocean route between July and November. In order to further expand the scope of operations into the dry season and winter, more ice-class ships are needed.
At present, the ship specifications, builders and further details have not been announced.
In the past two years, the size of container ships on the Arctic route has increased significantly. Following the smaller feeder ships in 2023, several Panamax container ships with a capacity of nearly 5,000 TEU appeared this summer. The Norwegian Center for High Logistics pointed out in a recent report that the container freight volume between China and Russia this summer was about 145,000 tons.
A key question is where the new ice-class container ships are built. The production capacity of Russia’s Zvezda Shipyard and the Baltic Shipyard has reached saturation, and the orders for nuclear-powered icebreakers, ice-class LNG carriers and oil tankers are already full. And the sanctions have affected the application of Western technology in Russia, such as fully-rotating full slewing propellers, marine propellers that can rotate 360 degrees, etc.
In recent years, Chinese shipyards have built many high ice-class ships, including heavy-lift ships “Audax” and “Pugnax”, and more recently tankers “Boris Sokolov” and “Anatoly Lamekhov”. Industry analysts said that unlike ice-class LNG carriers, ice-class container ships are relatively simple and “easy” for Chinese shipyards.