With our array of international container shipping services for both LCL and FCL cargoes, the U-Freight Group notes that analysis by Sea-Intelligence indicates that persistent port congestion is effectively removing around 1.7 million teu of containership capacity from the global market, an amount approaching the size of Evergreen\u2019s entire fleet.
The Copenhagen-based consultancy said its latest Global Liner Performance report shows little sign that liner schedule reliability is improving, with June 2026 performance continuing to hover around 60% to 65%.
Before the pandemic, carriers typically achieved schedule reliability of between 70% and 80%.
The deterioration is not simply about more ships arriving late. The ships that are delayed are also being held up for considerably longer.
Sea-Intelligence data shows that in the years before the pandemic a late vessel typically arrived three to four days behind schedule. The new normal appears to be around five to five-and-a-half days.
Combining the proportion of delayed ships with the length of those delays allows Sea-Intelligence to calculate how much fleet capacity is effectively tied up and therefore unavailable to shippers.
In June, delays absorbed approximately 5% of the global container fleet.
During the comparatively stable 2011-2019 period, around 2.2% of capacity was routinely absorbed by delays, meaning today\u2019s market is running 2.8 percentage points above the historic baseline.
In absolute terms, the current 5% absorption equates to approximately 1.7 million teu of containership capacity temporarily removed from effective supply.
Even stripping out the historic 2.2% level of normal disruption leaves around one million teu of additional capacity being swallowed up by delays \u2014 roughly equivalent to the fleet of HMM.
For shippers, the second half of 2026 may be less about waiting for normality to return and more about adapting to a market where pressure has become the norm.
The numbers help explain why container shipping capacity can remain surprisingly tight despite the enormous volume of new tonnage delivered by Asian shipyards in recent years.
Carriers may have considerably more ships on the water, but congestion, disrupted routings and deteriorating schedule performance mean a sizeable chunk of that theoretical capacity is not actually available at any given moment.
The U-Freight Group is monitoring these developments and considering the range of solutions that may be available to customers.
For expert advice or further information on our ocean freight services, please contact your local U-Freight office or visit the ocean freight section of this website.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
With our array of international container shipping services for both LCL and FCL cargoes, the U-Freight Group notes that analysis by Sea-Intelligence indicates that persistent port congestion is effectively removing around 1.7 million teu of containership capacity from the global market, an amount approaching the size of Evergreen\u2019s entire fleet. The Copenhagen-based consultancy said its…<\/p>","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4452,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4451","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ufreight.com\/tc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4451","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ufreight.com\/tc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ufreight.com\/tc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ufreight.com\/tc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ufreight.com\/tc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4451"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ufreight.com\/tc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4451\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4453,"href":"https:\/\/ufreight.com\/tc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4451\/revisions\/4453"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ufreight.com\/tc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4452"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ufreight.com\/tc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4451"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ufreight.com\/tc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4451"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ufreight.com\/tc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4451"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}