If the troubled South Korean shipping line Hanjin is to survive its current crisis, it will more than likely come out the other side a much smaller company.  This is after a south Korean judge ordered Hanjin to return all of its chartered ships to their owners and sell many of its own.

The carrier will finish discharging all of the cargo on its 63 leased vessels, and then return them to their owners.  "Once it's empty, we hand the keys over to the chartering company," Mike Radak, the chief operating officer of Hanjin Shipping America, LLC.  Three have already been returned.  Another 41 owned by Hanjin will steam back to Busan, South Korea, once they've delivered all their cargo.

After weeks of uncertainty following Hanjin's 31 August bankruptcy, ships have finally been allowed into ports to unload - resolving some of the financial debacle that has roiled global supply chains.  The most-likely outcome of the seventh-largest container line's bankruptcy still looks like liquidation.  There is a slim hope that enough assets can be scraped together to reemerge as a regional Asian carrier focused on South Korean exports.

Either way, it marks one of the biggest failures in the shipping industry, but may go some way to level out the supply-demand equation for a shipping industry that has been recently plagued with excessive capacity.