Focusing on the state of the container shipping market

Recently, there have been some interesting articles about the state of the global container shipping market, which have been of interest to the U-Freight Group, with our portfolio of LCL and FCL services in the oceanfreight environment.

On the Shipping247 website, Sam Chamber writes that the Red Sea shipping crisis – and the need to take the far longer route via the Cape of the Good Hope – has seen the proportion of containerships globally deployed on the industry’s top trade lane jump from a fifth to a quarter of all tonnage, according to a new study from Alphaliner.

Meanwhile on the Seatrade Maritime website, Global Shippers’ Forum (GSF) director James Hookham had some negative thoughts about the possible impact of industry observers making big assumptions and ‘talking the market up’ into achieving high spot rate costs on what is expected to be a demand spike on the Pacific trades.

Hookham said such projections were purely speculative and likely included the elevated surcharges that carriers are inclined to levy in times of disruption. “It is expected that there will be a huge surge in demand to beat the tariffs on China which are due to return in early August,” Hookham added, “but we expect a sharp spike (in rates), (but) it won’t endure.

There was also some interesting news about container line rankings by teu. Alphaliner gave a breakdown of the top 10 container shipping companies as of May 2025, based on data sourced from Alphaliner and presented by Container News.

The ranking underscores the continued concentration of market power among a few major players as demand for global trade evolves.

Meanwhile, recent data from Sea Intelligence reveals a notable improvement in global liner schedule reliability, reaching its highest level in 17 months.  According to April figures, overall reliability stood at 58.7 percent, the best performance since November 2023.

The full articles can be read in the links below:

https://splash247.com/quarter-of-all-box-tonnage-now-deployed-on-asia-europe-tradelane/

https://www.seatrade-maritime.com/containers/container-shippers-fear-efforts-to-talk-market-up–

https://container-news.com/container-lines-rankings-2025/

https://www.clecat.org/en/news/newsletters/ocean-schedule-reliability-improves-as-gemini-carr

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