Container shipping could face an overcapacity dilemma if its heavy orderbook arrives faster than cargo needed to fill them.
According to a Sea-Intelligence analysis of the International Monetary Fund’s biannual World Economic Outlook, demand is not growing fast enough to absorb the new shipping capacity entering service.
While the IMF expects overall global trade volume growth to stabilize from 4.6 percent this year to 4.7 percent in 2027, advanced economies are forecast to see import growth soften from 5 percent in 2026 to 4.2 percent in 2027.
Container shipping companies are buying new vessels in droves as longer routings and port congestion absorb existing ships and head-haul demand (the first leg of a trading route) still outpaces capacity, with the ocean carriers also seeking bigger, more versatile ships with cleaner emissions profiles.
Industry consultancy Linerlytica calculated last week that global vessel orders total 16.2 million 20-foot equivalent units (TEUs) of capacity, which amounts to 46.5 percent of the current global fleet.
Another container shipping research firm, Alphaliner, says roughly 1,000 newbuildings carrying 8.5 million TEUs are due to enter the market in 2027 and 2028, while this fall’s orders deliver mainly in 2029 and 2030.
Most of the major ocean carriers including Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC), Maersk, Cosco Shipping and CMA CGM either unveiled or have been reported to order new ships in recent months that are anticipated to be delivered mainly in 2029 and 2030.
BIMCO’s September outlook puts the IMF’s 2027 projections in starker terms, with fleet capacity forecast to grow 9 percent in 2027 after growth of 4.6 percent this year.
The global shipping association expects supply to outgrow demand in 2027 regardless of whether traffic through the conflict-ridden Strait of Hormuz normalizes, with effective supply rising 5 percent to 6 percent against vessel demand growth of 0.5 percent to 4.5 percent.
A wider return to the Suez Canal would also release more capacity, with BIMCO estimating full normalization would leave ship demand about 10 percent lower than currently required if vessels keep routing around the Cape of Good Hope.
China’s role in global trade largely explains why trade volumes look stronger than overall underlying container demand, with exports out of the country holding up despite trade with the U.S. contracting sharply after the implementation of high tariffs in 2025. Those tariffs have since largely been scaled back.
The IMF observed that Chinese exports to the U.S. fell 22 percent between February 2025 and January 2026, with U.S. exports to China falling 25 percent in that time frame. Yet outbound shipments of the affected Chinese products to third markets rose to 52 percent of the trade at risk within a year.
“Overall trade volumes did not collapse, because the production went to other places,” said Alan Murphy, CEO of Sea-Intelligence, in the update.
Murphy pointed out a more common practice in supply chains as companies sought to evade tariffs. Instead of shipping directly from China to the U.S., manufacturers are now sending parts to countries like Vietnam, Malaysia and Indonesia, where the products are put together before being shipped to the U.S.
“This keeps trade volumes steady, but for the manufacturers and shippers, this makes logistics much more complicated, adds extra stops at ports and increases costs,” Murphy said.
Going forward, there is also an expected gap between the price of goods moved via ocean-borne containers and the volumes, largely based on the boom in the artificial intelligence (AI) trade.
While the IMF noted that trade of AI hardware including semiconductors and other computing components has exponentially increased as a share of world GDP, Sea-Intelligence pointed out that the physical weight of these goods have “barely grown.”
In an August earnings call, Maersk CEO Vincent Clerc explained the carrier’s continued buildout of fleets despite the expected deceleration in overall trade volume growth.
“If I have a total market growing 4 percent but the head-haul demand is growing 7 to 8 percent, I need 7 to 8 percent more capacity every year just to be able to carry stuff,” Clerc said.
Maersk’s recent argument explains why the market has not already succumbed to overcapacity, as headline fleet growth does not always translate directly into capacity available where shippers need it.
“Operational disruption can materially reduce effective capacity even when nominal fleet capacity continues to grow,” said Michael Britton, head of North America’s ocean product at Maersk, in an Oct. 5 blog post. “When vessels travel longer routes or arrive outside planned windows, capacity is absorbed and disruption can spread through terminal operations, vessel rotations, equipment positioning and onward transportation.”
Britton cited a Sea-Intelligence update from August, which estimated that vessel delays took up about 5 percent of deep-sea capacity, or around 1.7 million TEUs, against a 2.2 percent average from 2011 to 2019.
Carriers still have levers, including slower sailing and blank sailings, with slower speeds alone expected to absorb about 1 percentage point of fleet growth both in 2026 and 2027, according to BIMCO.
These options do not take tonnage out of the fleet, so the same capacity comes back as soon as carriers speed up or restore sailings. Maersk’s second quarter report says demolitions neared zero for a sixth straight quarter.
While 10 million TEUs were added to the global fleet over the past 5.5 years, according to BIMCO, less than 300,000 TEUs have been removed in the same period. With ships aged 20 years or older accounting for just 16 percent of fleet capacity, there is not a large pool of obvious candidates to scrap, which leaves the 2027 delivery wave to be absorbed rather than offset.