Container Shipment

The Container shipping plays an important role in the globalised and industrialised world. Goods, commodities and raw materials can thus be transported from any point in the world to the desired destination. There are also suitable transport ships for every type of transport goods.

For this reason, ships for container shipment are generally referred to as container ships. The freight capacity of container ships is quantified in TEU. The abbreviation TEU means "Twenty foot equivalent" and corresponds to the number of 20-foot containers that can be loaded on the container ship.

An idea conquers the world

For the American Malcolm P. McLean, reloading the goods in the port was too costly. So in 1937, as a young transport entrepreneur, he had the idea of loading complete trucks onto ships, later only the trailers with their containers and finally only the containers themselves.

McLean founded his first shipping company in 1956 and finally implemented his idea. Germany's first container ship, however, sailed from Hamburg in 1968.

Indispensable in the movement of goods

Nowadays, the worldwide import and export takes place mainly by Container shipping. About 18 million containers are moved in the ports of Northern Germany alone. In Container shipping, around 356 million containers are transported by shipping companies each year.

To avoid confusion and to be able to assign each container to the correct owner, a container has its own number consisting of four capital letters representing the owner, followed by six further digits plus a control number. This makes it easy to determine the container's whereabouts and route during Container shipment.