Alliances in container shipping reshuffle

In the largest reshuffle for a decade, we have seen container shipping lines jumping ship from existing alliances on the main east-west trades.

That made interesting reading for the U-Freight Group, with our comprehensive portfolio of international container shipping services for both LCL and FCL import and export cargoes.

Here’s how the new alliances now shape up.

THE Alliance is now the Premier Alliance, with Ocean Network Express (ONE), HMM and Yang Ming Marine Transportation as partners – MSC helping plug gaps on Asia-Europe trades.

MSC has ditched Maersk in the 2M vessel sharing agreement to largely go it alone.

Hapag-Lloyd has left THE Alliance and joined Maersk in what is called the Gemini Cooperation.

Remaining intact from February 1st is the Ocean Alliance, made up of COSCO, OOCL, CMA CGM and Evergreen.

Ocean Alliance is the one with the largest market share and widest market coverage this year, according to analysis from Linerlytica.

The Gemini partners have been public about their goal of providing 90% schedule reliability in an industry that has struggled to make good on half its promised arrivals. So good luck with that.

For the alliances and their customers – no matter how well-planned out – there will be disruptions. We are talking about hundreds of vessels that need to change their rotations.

There are excellent articles on the Splash 247 and Freightwaves websites about this, which are well worth a visit at the links in the panel below

https://splash247.com/global-liner-alliances-retrench/

https://www.freightwaves.com/news/what-shippers-should-know-about-ocean-carrier-alliance-changes-in-2025?oly_enc_id=2359H2956723J0G

For more information about our ocean freight forwarding and logistics services, please visit the relevant pages of this website, or contact your local office, which can be seen here: https://ufreight.com/locations