SIMIC

Parent Orient Overseas (International) Ltd (OOIL) said its liner operator subsidiary reeled in $5.04 billion in revenue during the period, which marked a 16.9 per cent improvement on the $4.31 billion earned in the same period of 2021.

While the company has yet to report OOCL's bottom-line profits, the top-line figure suggests the Hong Kong container ship operator is continuing to enjoy strong freight income even as spot rates decline, reports Oslo's TradeWinds.

The biggest gains were made in its intra-Asia and Australasia services, where revenue jumped 29.6 per cent to reach nearly $1.46 billion in the latest quarter.

Asia-to-Europe services were the lone laggard, slipping 1.4 per cent to bring in revenue of $1.6 billion.

And OOCL delivered the revenue growth despite declining cargo volumes. The company lifted 1.75 million TEU during the third quarter, which represented a 3.4 per cent slump on the same period of last year.

That was driven primarily by falling transpacific liftings, which dropped 14.4 per cent to just over 419,000TEU.

The third-quarter revenue gains helped fuel a 43.4 per cent surge for the first nine months of the year, when OOCL pocketed nearly $15.5 billion.

The ultimate performance of the company is not clear, as it has yet to reveal its costs or bottom-line profit. But the gains come as spot freight indicators have been sliding. Drewry's World Container Index reached $3,689 per FEU last Thursday, an 8 per cent decline on the prior week and a 64 per cent plunge compared to a year earlier.

But liner operators' earnings are insulated, for now, because much of their business is on term contracts that renew annually.