Shipping slump: Why a vessel worth $60m was sold as scrap

From the BBC, mainly because of over-supply of ships, but also:

The Panama effect

So shippers looking to carry cargoes from Asia to the American east coast ports, can now take Neo-Panamaxes through the new canal – and sell off their smaller Panamaxes. That’s why Panamaxes like the Hammonia Grenada are going cheap – in fact, they’re going nowhere…

Hitherto, from the point of view of Chinese exporting to Europe or the US, they were pretty indifferent between using the Suez Canal (simple, cheap to build and maintain) and the Suez Canal (stupendous and expensive feat of engineering), so the tolls (largely rent to use that location) which either canal could charge was roughly the same.

Assuming people prefer using larger ships, whichever canal allows larger ships is obviously as a huge advantage and can charge extra tolls, but this suggests that Suezmax ships are still slightly larger than Panamax ships, in which case the Panama Canal has miserably failed to leap-frog the Suez Canal in terms of size, but nice try anyway.