How many merchant ships are in the world?

Factual Questions
1

I was just wondering if there is a precise number of the merchant vessels active now. Which country has the most? Does North Korea have any?

2

For up-to-date data, what you need is a copy of “Shipping Intelligence Weekly”. Unfortunately this costs $3,500 plus.

3

Over 550,000 vessels (almost all merchant) are in the MarineTraffic.com AIS database. MarineTraffic: Global Ship Tracking Intelligence | AIS Marine Traffic

4

Define Merchant Ship. Also define both “merchant” and “ship”. The world is full of small vessels that move goods and people this is especially true in S Asia and the Far East. Do you mean Ocean going vessels? Or riverine ones as well. Lots of “merchies” are seasonal, a fishing trawler might move cargo in the off season.

5

As to North Korea, yes they do. There’s even a list on Wikipedia of exactly what they have. Then there is the issue of "flag of convenience ". Just because a ship is flagged to a certain country may not mean there’s a strong connection.

6

North Korean merchant shipping seems to be a real thing, but hits the news when there are drug seizures on board. In most other countries the expectation this that this would be illegal behaviour by individuals, but reporting takes the position that it is likely to be state-sanctioned drug-running for the foreign exchange it brings in.

In 2003, the Pong Su incident - where Australia’s crack border force busts open a politically linked North Korean heroin racket in Operation Sorbet [!].

7

Here are a couple of stats,
file:///C:/Users/User/Downloads/Equasis%20Statistics%20-%20The%20world%20fleet%202014.pdf
by ‘Equasis’, world merchant fleet 2014, 85,000 over 100 gross tons. You can see from categories at the end that it doesn’t include fishing vessels which would be a major addition to smaller vessels. There were around 54k merchant ships over 500 gross tons, arguably a rough proxy for ‘oceangoing’.

http://unctadstat.unctad.org/wds/TableViewer/tableView.aspx
Gives around 90,000; couldn’t readily see the size and type cut offs.

Sale into North Korean registry has become a fairly common second to last stop for relatively small cargo vessels in the Far East, before the scrap yard. NK runs a low cost, low quality fleet of such vessels to earn hard currency in third party trade.