Andrew Craig-Bennett provides readers with a rundown on liner shipping in 2025, as well as making some predictions for next year.

The containership charter market has managed to get to the end of 2025 without falling off the tightrope into the abyss of oversupply. It has wobbled a bit, but the rope has carried it into December. Containership owners can thank the Houthis and also president Trump, but they can also thank the inherent tendency of liner shipping companies to destroy one another, a tendency first remarked on by John Samuel Swire in the early 1880s

Containerships started the year in what would have been a state of slight oversupply, were it not for our ‘friends’ in Yemen adding all those lovely ton miles. As the year went by, the theoretical oversupply grew, but the Houthis didn’t give up and the Trumpery government of the United States generated lots of lovely panic buying. This was splendid, of course, but it might not have been enough without the sterling efforts of the boards of directors of the great liner companies, who decided to fight each other in the modern manner, by which I mean covertly, just as nations use drones, merchant ship anchors, immigration, paid politicians and social media as an alternative to armies navies and air forces.

The great containerlines have been busy adding to their stocks of very big boxboats and absolutely enormous boxboats for quite a while, but they seem to have assumed that the doctors, dentists and garage owners of Germany would continue to supply them with a good supply of feeder ships, as they have done since the 1980s.

The doctors and dentists did not come out to play. They had got severely burned in the last downturn, when feeder ships were scrapped after one special survey, and they seem to have decided that the tramp feedership marker was no longer where they wanted to be.

Without actually telling anyone, the good and the great of liner shipping started squabbling like seagulls over a shoal of sprats, trying to pick up tramp feeder ships. Not content with paying higher charter rates, they started buying and running the sprats of the boxboat world, to stop each other from getting them.

At this point, peering into the murk ahead, we try to discern what the containership world may look like in 2026. Not because we particularly want to – we can hardly hope for better things – but because tradition, and in my case Sam Chambers, requires it.  

I think we used up two black swans with the Houthis and the Trumpery tariffs. I don’t think there are likely to be many more. The nearest thing to a black swan event for containerships in 2026 that I can see would be the great liner companies agreeing not to tear lumps off each other, but at the moment they still have fat war chests, they can see the downturn coming and they still think that their best move will be to bag as many customers as possible, just like in 1881.

We may ponder whether this is likely to come to pass. On the one hand, the anti-competitive measures taken in recent years have worked rather well – certainly better than most people expected, but on the other hand we now have a US government that sues anyone at the drop of a hat.  

The supply side of the picture, beloved of shipping analysts because it is easy to measure, is simple. There are lots and lots of new boxboats on order, mostly big stuff. There is a faint possibility that demand may rise to meet it, but it probably won’t.

And that’s without any sort of a financial crisis.