Port congestion is doing container shipping an enormous favour, absorbing 2.3m teu of vessel capacity at precisely the moment the industry is preparing for a potentially brutal release of tonnage from both newbuildings and a return to the Suez Canal.
New Sea-Intelligence data shows worsening delays have rendered 6.6% of the global containership fleet effectively unavailable, up sharply from around 5% in June and three times the pre-pandemic baseline of 2.2%.
The 2.3m teu currently swallowed by delays would, if it were a standalone carrier, rank as the world’s sixth largest, only marginally behind Hapag-Lloyd.
The deterioration has been remarkably quick. Global schedule reliability fell 6.1 percentage points in July to 56.4%, the sharpest monthly decline since January 2021. Late ships were running an average 6.06 days behind schedule, a level largely unseen outside the pandemic and the immediate aftermath of the Red Sea crisis.
Asia is at the centre of the problem. All 14 of the region’s busiest ports recorded deteriorating reliability in July, with successive typhoons compounding already stretched terminal networks. Shanghai’s schedule reliability collapsed to just 21%, Ningbo managed 34.6%, while Singapore stood at 43.2%.
The figures tally with the increasingly extraordinary congestion data reported by Splash in recent weeks. Linerlytica calculated last week that more than 4.3m teu of containership capacity was waiting to berth worldwide, surpassing even the absolute covid-era peak. Drewry has meanwhile warned that global vessel waiting times have nearly doubled compared with 2019 as ports struggle with increasingly concentrated waves of ship arrivals.
The capacity squeeze, however, could unwind rapidly.
Sea-Intelligence estimates that, based on previous congestion cycles, the current disruption would take around four-and-a-half to six months to return to the lows seen in June 2025, or just two to three-and-a-half months to get back to end-2025 levels.
At the same time another, much larger capacity release is taking shape.
Mediterranean Shipping Co (MSC), Maersk, CMA CGM and others are progressively returning services to Suez, with around 19% of Asia-Europe capacity now shifting back from the Cape route.
Sea-Intelligence calculates that a full Suez normalisation would produce an 8.7% year-on-year contraction in global head-haul teu-mile demand during the first half of 2027, despite assuming underlying container demand growth of a healthy 6.6%. Even a 50% return to Suez would push teu-mile growth into negative territory. That matters with the containership orderbook already standing at around 40% of the existing fleet
