Cover Story
Shipping association Bimco expects capacity to grow between 3 % and 4 % this year, with volume growth of about 2.5 % to 3.5 %. But Jain said the traditional ways of understanding supply and demand are no longer relevant.
“ We should fully expect the carriers to make the most of this.”
“ If you look across different subsectors in the last year— bulk, container, tanker, product tanker, crude— absolute supply significantly exceeded absolute demand, and still 2025 was far more profitable than 2019,” the HSBC analyst said.“ That tells you that gone are the days where 2 % supply [ growth ] was good enough for 2 % of demand.
“ At the start of the year, there was an expectation that we would see some sort of resumption of Red Sea transits,”
Jain added.“ With the Red Sea out of the picture, nominal supply growth was only 4 % to 4.5 %. I don’ t think that 4 % to 4.5 % supply is good enough to even manage 2 % of demand [ growth ], and demand is probably tracking more like 4 % than 2 %.”
Renee Toh, vice president of global ocean freight at forwarder Rhenus Logistics, said the major trade lanes out of Asia are no longer defined by a single seasonal surge, but by multiple, overlapping demand waves that are reshaping capacity dynamics and freight rates.
“ The idea of a‘ peak season’ is becoming outdated,” Toh said in a June 16 statement.“ Instead of one predictable surge, we are seeing demand fluctuate in multiple waves across the year.
“ Volumes are less consistent, more reactive and increasingly driven by external factors, from disruptions to cost expectations and retail cycles,” she added.“ Calling it an‘ early peak season’ oversimplifies what is actually a structural shift in how global trade flows.”
Stranded supply
Persian Gulf bottleneck tightens global container availability
By Michael Angell
The closure of the Strait of Hormuz and widespread port congestion are crimping the return of empty containers to Asia and other export markets, prompting ocean carriers to look at leasing boxes to deal with the deficit. While the situation is not considered critical, shippers should expect delays at origin until equipment supply catches up with demand.
Even with a tenuous agreement between the US and Iran, container ship transits through the Strait of Hormuz remain throttled. From March 1 through June 11, an average of just one container ship per day moved through the strait in either direction, compared with about 22 daily vessel transits before the war, according to S & P Global Commodities at Sea, a sister product of the Journal of Commerce within S & P Global.
Many ships in the region have turned off satellite tracking to help avoid attacks, so vessel transits may be higher than estimated. However, according to S & P Global data, at least 72 container ships totaling 219,500 TEUs of capacity were spotted drifting or at anchor in the Persian Gulf between June 1 and June 10.
Major ocean carriers have resumed container bookings to the region thanks to alternative routings, but the ongoing danger to vessels and the large amount of equipment that was inside the Gulf when the war began has left ports throughout the Arabian Peninsula choked with empty containers.
“ The Mideast is very much a one-way trade... It’ s difficult to evacuate the empties around this situation.”
“ The Mideast is very much a one-way trade, where loaded boxes go in and empty boxes go out,” Robert Sappio, chief executive of Seacube Container Leasing, told the Journal of Commerce.“ The shipping lines are doing interesting things to get cargo off outside of the Gulf and truck overland into the Gulf states, but it’ s difficult to evacuate the empties around this situation.
“ Shipping lines are calling the leasing companies and asking what units we have at our depots and what newbuild inventory you have,” Sappio added.
Hapag-Lloyd said in a Mideast operational update in early June that major ports in the region have capacity utilization of 90 %, with vessel delays of two to three days and lower overall port productivity. Ports throughout the Indian subcontinent face similar congestion.
Shippers are beginning to see the impact of the equipment backlog. In a May conference call, Steven Bromley, the chief executive of Canada-based global distributor Organto Foods, said the company is“ seeing some of the impacts of the craziness that’ s going on in the Middle East,” including“ some container dislocation.”
The tight supply of empty containers comes as frontloading is contributing to early peak seasons on the trans-Pacific and Asia – Europe trades. Sappio said carriers he has spoken with are reporting utilization of 100 % on vessels in major trade lanes.
“ You’ re seeing congestion in ports around the world, and the flow of equipment and goods has been further constrained and hampered,” he said.“ All of a sudden in the last two weeks,
12 Journal of Commerce | July 6, 2026 www. joc. com