The 2020s – the most disruptive decade for commercial shipping in many generations – have seen the average distance of global seaborne trade increase by 10% according to new data from Clarksons Research, boosting tonne-mile vessel demand, and profits. 

Seaborne trade amounted to a total 68trn tonne-miles last year, with the average tonne of seaborne trade travelling 5,262 nautical miles, up by 10% since the start of the decade. 

Underlying trends such as the rapid growth in US energy exports and Guinea’s bauxite exports have been supportive, but it has been the series of disruptive events that have amplified these trends such as Russia’s war with Ukraine, US-China trade strains, Panama Canal constraints, as well as the Red Sea and Hormuz shipping crises. 

Distance gains this decade have lifted vessel demand with Clarksons projecting that 57% of tonne-mile growth across 2020-26 (+18%) will have been accounted for by average haul rather than volume growth, remarkable compared to the more limited contributions seen through the 2000s and 2010s (see chart below).

“[F]or now shipping demand is benefitting from a trip the long way round,” Clarksons concluded in its most recent weekly report. 

Discussing disruption, Tim Smith, a director at Maritime Strategies International, wrote in an article for Splash earlier this year: “This upside to demand has translated into higher earnings, and the 2020s have generally been prosperous, albeit volatile, years for shipowners.”

“After six long years of continuous disruption, starting with covid in January 2020, shipping analysts can be forgiven for longing back to the good ol’ days when only supply and demand fundamentals and perhaps a sprinkling of market sentiment actually mattered,” commented Roar Adland, SSY’s head of research, in a contribution to Splash at the turn of the year. 

Emanuele Grimaldi, chairman of the International Chamber of Shipping, writing for Splash, argued: “Geopolitical and business volatility is becoming the rule rather than the exception.”

“Despite uncertainty in the long run, trade flows are reorganising rather than disappearing,” said Alex Karydis, a director at German owner Hanse Bereederung, in the latest Maritime CEO magazine. “This restructuring favours flexible, well-specified tonnage and owners who understand deployment, emissions performance, and charterer needs in detail. In that sense, volatility is creating opportunity for those positioned correctly.”

The practical result of this era is what Captain Pappu Sastry, CEO of Adhira Shipping & Logistics, described in the same magazine as an “uncertainty tax” on every voyage. “We are in a persistent phase of fragmentation,” Sastry said. “This means longer and less predictable tradelanes, heavier compliance burdens, and insurance or war-risk swings that can change voyage economics quickly.” 

Eman Abdalla, managing partner of SeaThrew Marine, writing for Splash earlier this year, maintained: “Security and resilience now sit alongside cost as primary drivers of trade. This is not cyclical volatility. It is structural volatility. And structural volatility changes the rules of the game.”

Cargoes do not disappear in crises, Abdalla pointed out, saying that they often travel farther, sustaining tonne-mile demand even as sentiment weakens.

“The old playbook assumed volatility was temporary. The new reality is that volatility is the operating environment,” Abdalla concluded.