Port congestion has removed 3 million TEU from the market, jeopardizing recovery ahead of the Lunar New Year, warns Sea-Intelligence.
Sea-Intelligence has issued a sobering assessment of global container shipping. Worsening port congestion has effectively removed about 3 million TEU of containership capacity from the market, and a full recovery before the early-2027 Lunar New Year cargo rush now looks unlikely.
Vessel delays, driven mainly by a string of typhoons striking major Asian ports, now tie up 8.5% of the global fleet, according to Sea-Intelligence. The absorbed capacity has climbed to 3 million TEU, an increase of more than 75% from the 1.7 million TEU recorded in mid-August. The scale is striking. A fleet of this magnitude would rank as the world's fifth-largest carrier, positioned between Cosco and Hapag-Lloyd.
Global schedule reliability fell to 49.9% in August, with average vessel delay rising sharply to 6.8 days—a level exceeded only at the height of pandemic disruption. Shanghai and Ningbo were hit hardest. Reliability at the two Chinese majors fell to between 12% and 17%, with late arrivals running eight to nine days behind schedule.
This terminal gridlock was heavily compounded by late-summer typhoon closures that completely halted operations at both these ports, the report said.
Drawing on how quickly past congestion cleared, Sea-Intelligence estimated it would take seven to ten months to return to the relatively low congestion levels of June 2025, and six to eight months to return to end-2025 conditions. With Chinese New Year falling on February 6, 2027, the firm warned that Asian port congestion is now likely to be only partially alleviated ahead of the seasonal uptick in cargo.
The effect on cargo owners is less severe than the headline reliability figure suggests. After weighting individual trades by actual container volumes, Sea-Intelligence found cargo-weighted reliability was more than six percentage points above the vessel-based measure. The difference reflects a sharper deterioration on lower-volume backhaul trades than on the major headhaul routes.
We are seeing a situation where the global average schedule reliability, measured at the vessel level, is worse than the actual impact on loaded containers, the report added.
Bhavan Vempati, Maersk's head of ocean business in Asia-Pacific, echoed concerns about port congestion. In an interview with Lloyd's List, Vempati said that, compared with a full return to the Red Sea, landside bottlenecks are the 'bigger' problem for shipping.
The real constraint has shifted from vessel capacity to landside and the infrastructure bottlenecks, he said, noting that port-side congestion now appears across regions, not just in Asia. These landside bottlenecks—extending across inland waterways, rail, and trucking—are amplified by continued strong export demand from Asia, particularly China, despite tariffs and geopolitical uncertainties.
The industry's response is constrained by time. With greenfield terminals requiring six to ten years to reach operation, today's investment decisions will do little to ease near-term congestion if demand keeps outpacing capacity, Vempati added.
The combined pressures of vessel delays, typhoon closures, and mounting landside constraints signal a challenge that reaches well beyond a single peak season—a structural test of how the container shipping industry positions its capacity, infrastructure, and investment for the years ahead.
