Meet the South Korean company that might have already ruined Christmas for Amreeka: US retailers are in fear that the Christmas shopping season might be ruined as Hanjin Shipping, South Korea’s biggest container line and the world’s seventh-largest, filed for receivership. Sixty-six of Hanjin’s ships, carrying USD 14.5 bn worth of goods, including large quantities of consumer electronics heading for America, were left stranded at sea, The Economist says. “Ports around the world did not want to let Hanjin’s vessels dock because the bankrupt line had no money to pay unloading fees. Neither did they want creditors impounding Hanjin’s vessels in their facilities, leaving valuable moorings occupied for months.”Some of the goods were destined to retailers in order to be sold during Christmas.

Bonus fact for iSheep like us: Hanjin is apparently behind slow delivery of iPhone 7 units to the US and Canada — to the point that Apple has apparently stepped in and paid port fees just to get its cargo off the vessels

This is part of a bigger problem in the shipping industry as a whole. “Hanjin’s bankruptcy—and the abysmal performance of so many lines—is the result of overcapacity in the shipping industry. Since the financial crisis, too many vessels have been built and not enough scrapped, while the growth in global trade has decelerated.” Activist investors are calling for consolidation in the sector, but the newspaper says the woes of the industry will not be addressed until enough lines scrap their ships to the point at which “the amount of spare capacity in the industry would fall, and freight rates would rise to a point where firms in it would break even.” The problem is that “for stronger players such as Maersk, building more big ships means that freight rates fall faster, pushing weaker competitors out of business. And many smaller lines cannot afford to scrap their ships. Low steel prices mean that they would need to declare big losses on their balance sheets if they scrapped them.”

This leads The Economist to the grim prediction that more shipping lines will declare bankruptcy, unless “some serious scrapping takes place,” which remains unlikely as Hanjin has become an acquisition target for Maersk. Bloomberg cites David Kerstens, Jefferies’s transport analyst, in saying that “the most likely scenario is that Maersk would take over the assets of Hyundai and Hanjin.” Maersk says its acquisitions aims to avoid flooding the market with new vessels, but did not address the idea that the market is already suffering from excess capacity.