This past week, MSC scheduled the deployment of 23,000+ TEU vessels on their Asia-WAF ‘Africa Express’ service. At present, the largest vessel on the service is of 16,600 TEU, with the average vessel size on the service of 14,465 TEU. These new phase-in’s would increase the nominal capacity of the service by 50%, which is a substantial increase. The first of these deployments, MSC Diletta, was pulled from the Asia-NEUR ‘Lion’ service, and was later replaced by a smaller 15,500 TEU vessel. This is a surprising development considering that over the past few years, the opposite trend has been prevalent i.e., smaller vessels on Asia-NEUR being replaced by larger vessels. (....)