Asia-Americas container shipping system on a knife-edge

The container shipping system between Asia and the Americas hasn’t been this tight since the early peak season in 2024. That there are still plenty of potential pitfalls, from tighter Panama Canal restrictions to stronger-than-expected import volumes, should send a warning to shippers dependent on the trade lane.

A bevy of factors is stretching the global system to the point where virtually all available tonnage is on the water. Global fleet idling was at just 0.5% in mid-August, according to Alphaliner.

Port congestion globally, tying up approximately 4.3 million TEUs and fueled by recent storms in Asia that delayed shipments at major East Asia hubs, is now occupying more tonnage than during the worst of the pandemic disruption in 2022, according to analyst Linerlytica. However, the swelling of the global fleet since then by some 9.1 million TEUs has eased the share of capacity tied up at ports; 15.7% then compared with 12.6% now.

In 2024 during the first major shock since the pandemic, tonnage and equipment — stretched by new Red Sea diversions — sagged under the frontloading of US imports ahead of new tariffs from the second Trump administration and the threat, later realized, of a US East Coast longshore strike. Container spot rate indexes are tracking near or higher than two years ago but still thousands of dollars below pandemic-era highs.

Compared with a year ago, the cost to ship a 40-foot container from Asia to Los Angeles is up 182%; to the West Coast of Mexico, it’s up 176%; and up 113% to Brazil’s Santos, according to indexes from Drewry, Eternity and the Shanghai Shipping Exchange, respectively.

Rates may still climb further if pressure on the shipping system increases. The direct blows to the system in just a few weeks include delays and diversions in China tied to Typhoon Dolphin, which sucked out 500,000 TEUs of functional capacity, and tighter Panama Canal transit restrictions due to low water levels.

Ocean carriers are already warning about fresh potential delays at Shanghai and Ningbo due to the approaching Typhoon Saudel. At the same time, the Super El Niño weather pattern is strengthening, with meteorologists giving it a 90% chance of becoming “very strong” in the fall and winter.

Those hits to the system come on top of an already stretched global system due to the Hormuz crisis, bottlenecks in Europe due to low water levels on the Rhine River, and falling Amazon River levels preventing ships from accessing Brazil’s Manaus port.

Unsurprisingly, global schedule reliability in July fell to 56.4%, the lowest level this year and the weakest since February 2025, according to the latest readings available from Sea-Intelligence.

More opportunistic carriers have shifted capacity between the Asia-North America and Asia-Latin America trades, or pulled tonnage from other trades, to chase accelerating rates, adding pressure on the system. The proximity of services feeding South and North America and the use of similarly-sized vessels make shifting tonnage operationally easier than pulling ships from other trades.

Ocean reliability from Asia to the US East Coast crashed to 13% in July, according to data from Xeneta’s eeSea, while reliability from Asia to the East and West coasts of South America dropped to single digits.

There is no short-term solution to the currently constrained system, Maersk CEO Vincent Clerc told investors earlier this month. With growing market demand outstripping existing terminal capacity, “we were bound to hit a bottleneck at some point,” he said.

No let-up

Concerns among ocean carriers that the early peak season of frontloading imports from Asia could fizzle in the early fall after hitting year-to-date high volumes in July are fading. Multiple ocean carriers and forwarders told the Journal of Commerce this week that US imports from Asia are likely to stay elevated until China’s Golden Week holiday in the first week of October. That jibes with what US retailers said they are planning, as reported in the Global Port Tracker released two weeks ago.

In response, carriers in the eastbound trans-Pacific are only modestly reducing their planned tonnage over the next two months, with the West Coast actually receiving a top up in September. Compared with August, when some 2.26 million TEUs of capacity were deployed from Asia to the US, pro forma schedules show carriers deploying approximately 2.23 million TEUs next month and in October, according to eeSea. For the West Coast alone, capacity is expected to tick about 2.5% higher.

“When demand started picking up in the course of the second quarter, lots of people thought that might be short-lived,” Hapag Lloyd CEO Rolf Habben Jansen told reporters earlier this month. “But even up to today, I think we still see very robust volume, so a very decent peak season.”

This article was originally published by the Journal of Commerce on Aug. 27, 2026.