The Impact of the New Panama Canal on Cost-savings in the Shipping Industry

The passage through the Panama Canal has become the usual waterway for all the ships that can navigate through the Canal. The traffic through the canal is limited by the size of a ship. The need for the expansion of the Canal has emerged due to the development of the global trade and the shipping industry. The new dimensions of the lock-chambers determine the size of the ships as well. The new generation of ships built to the largest specifications possible to transit the current locks of the canal are called the Post-Panamax vessels. The maximum dimensions of these ships are 366 meters in length, 49 meters in beam and 15.2 metres in draught. The paper analyses savings in the operational costs on three types of the Post-Panamax vessels after the Canal expansion.