Sea Intelligence

On April 9th, 2025, the US announced 145% tariffs on China, stifling Transpacific container shipping demand, and the shipping lines responded by reducing capacity on the transpacific. On May 12th, …

In Sea-Intelligence Sunday Spotlight issue 721, we analysed the weekly volatility in the capacity offered in the Asia to the North American West Coast (NAWC) trade. This volatility is caused …

Sea-Intelligence has published issue 166 of the Global Liner Performance (GLP) report, with schedule reliability figures up to and including May 2025. As the 120-page report is quite comprehensive and …

In issue 720 of the Sunday Spotlight, we analysed port performance in terms of schedule reliability, across the 202 deep-sea ports with the largest number of container vessel calls, by …

Gven how turbulent the pandemic years were in terms of supply and demand, we often compare current events to 2019, which was the last “normal” year pre-pandemic. When we look …

Niche carriers – the relatively smaller carriers with limited deep-sea scope – accounted for 7%-10% of the total weekly capacity deployed on Asia-North America West Coast (NAWC) throughout 2019. During …

The pause in the US-China trade war, and the associated demand boom, has caused a scramble amongst shipping lines to inject capacity swiftly. On Asia-North America West Coast (NAWC), we …

Sea-Intelligence has published issue 165 of the Global Liner Performance (GLP) report, with schedule reliability figures up to and including April 2025. As the 120-page report is quite comprehensive and …

Despite market uncertainty and a volatile geopolitical climate, the shipping lines have reported strong 2025-Q1 results. Nearly all major shipping lines (that report on their financial figures), have reported double-digit …

With no pre-warning, the US Administration and China announced that they had reached an agreement, partly pausing tariffs for 90 days – we say ‘partly’ because the US is still …

Long transit times do not inherently cause problems for importers, as that can be factored into their lead times; what often creates operational issues is when the actual transit times …

Over the past several weeks, we have reported on a sharp week-by-week increase in the number of blank sailings on the Transpacific. When we look across what was deployed in …

Sea-Intelligence has published issue 164 of the Global Liner Performance (GLP) report, with schedule reliability figures up to and including March 2025. As the 120-page report is quite comprehensive and …

In issue 712 of the Sea-Intelligence Sunday Spotlight, we analysed the impact of the revised proposal by the US Trade Representative (USTR) to penalise Chinese shipping lines and non-Chinese shipping …

The impact of the US tariff war continues to have a direct impact on container shipping operations, as the number of cancelled sailings on the Transpacific trade increased drastically yet …

The current political climate is extremely volatile and given that tariffs are being imposed and suspended on an almost daily basis, we assume that both the shipping lines and cargo …

In 30+ years of container shipping alliances, the domain of the alliances has always been exclusively on mainliner, deep-sea services, with individual carrier members operating their own feeder services. Gemini …

Container freight rates have a strong seasonal tendency to weaken in the period following Chinese New Year (CNY). In 2025, however, the decline in spot rates is significantly more negative, …

Sea-Intelligence has published issue 163 of the Global Liner Performance (GLP) report, with schedule reliability figures up to and including February 2025. As the 120-page report is quite comprehensive and …

The major shipping lines (that report on – and have so far published – their financial figures), have recorded a combined 2024-FY EBIT of USD 27.3bn. In comparison, the combined …

TEU*Miles growth rates were even higher throughout 2024, more than 20%, but this was due to the rerouting of container services from Suez to round-Africa due to the Red Sea …

Figure 1 shows the average and maximum vessel size of vessels deployed on deep-sea services to West Africa. Since June 2022, the average vessel size to West Africa has grown …

Figure 1 shows the ratio of laden imports between the East and West Coast North America ports. A figure higher than 1 represents more volumes being handled by the West …

Sea-Intelligence has published issue 162 of the Global Liner Performance (GLP) report, with schedule reliability figures up to and including January 2025. As the report itself is quite comprehensive and …

When the Red Sea crisis emerged and vessels began sailing around Africa, the Asia-Europe supply chain became 7-14 days longer, depending on port-pair configurations. When supply chains become longer, it …

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) recently published the January 2025 update to their World Economic Outlook (WEO) report, which was published in October 2024. In this update, key revisions were …

February 1st marked the start of a new competitive landscape in the pivotal deep-sea container trades from Asia to North America and Europe. Consequently, we looked at the changes in …

Sea-Intelligence has published issue 161 of the Global Liner Performance (GLP) report, with schedule reliability figures up to and including December 2024. As the report itself is quite comprehensive and …

The latest inventories data from the US Census Bureau shows that the US retailers are continuing to grow inventories, beyond what sales can accommodate for. Figure 1 shows the development …

The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development releases a quarterly Port Liner Shipping Connectivity Index (PLSCI), giving ports an index-based liner connectivity score. Figure 1 shows a tiered list …

This year, Chinese New Year (CNY) will fall on January 29, which means that it is only a little over 3 weeks away. It also falls only a few days …

Sea-Intelligence has published issue 160 of the Global Liner Performance (GLP) report, with schedule reliability figures up to and including November 2024. As the report itself is quite comprehensive and …

The current three-alliance structure in container shipping has been present since April 2017, and will be for another month, before a new structure takes its place in February 2025. Looking …

The current three-alliance structure in container shipping has been in place since April 2017, when Ocean Alliance and THE Alliance launched alongside the already existing 2M alliance. After nearly 8 …

The current three-alliance structure has been in place since April 2017, when Ocean Alliance and THE Alliance launched operationally, alongside the already existing 2M alliance. After nearly 8 years of …

Sea-Intelligence has published issue 159 of the Global Liner Performance (GLP) report, with schedule reliability figures up to and including October 2024. As the report itself is quite comprehensive and …

The major carriers have reported a combined 2024-Q3 EBIT of USD 17.06bn, which is a 600% increase Y/Y – the Y/Y increase is discounting ZIM who reported a one-time non-cash …

Since 2019, the most reliable of the top-13 global carriers in each month, has rarely been the most reliable carrier in more than 30% of the trade lanes, that they …

US consumer spending data for September 2024 has been released by the US Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), and the growth rate of US consumer spending on both goods and …

Sea-Intelligence has published issue 158 of the Global Liner Performance (GLP) report, with schedule reliability figures up to and including September 2024. As the report itself is quite comprehensive and …

The latest data from the US Census Bureau shows that there is a consistent inventory increase in the retail sector. Not only are retailers increasing inventories, the pace of increase …

From a network design perspective, for every weekly deep-sea liner service, one vessel would be scheduled to depart from an origin region each week. However, in the real world, a …

It is well-known that all deep-sea trades, to some degree, tend to be lopsided, with one end of the trade importing more than they are exporting. In this context, the …

Fortunately, the long-feared strike in the US East Coast ports, ended after just three days of strike, and the members of the International Longshoremen's Association (ILA) went back to work …

Sea-Intelligence has published issue 138 of the Global Liner Performance (GLP) report, with schedule reliability figures up to and including January 2023. As the report itself is quite comprehensive and …

As we have shown on many occasions, freight rates are primarily determined by changes in vessel utilisation, which in turn means that when shipping lines deploy “too much” capacity, they …

At the onset of the pandemic, carriers were able to cut capacity in line with the massive demand contraction. However, the same degree of commitment has not been seen with …

Unlike on the Transpacific, where weekly scheduled capacity more than 2 weeks out (relative to the week of departure) was considerably higher than what was eventually deployed, there was no …

While the pandemic challenges were initiated by an exceptionally large growth in demand, the real challenge came as this high demand growth clogged up the hinterlands, which in turn clogged …

The shipping lines continued where they left off in 2021 and reported a very strong financial result for 2022. At the initial time of writing, 12 of the largest shipping …