Global trade is turning in a surprisingly strong performance this year – along with a rising tide of empty containers that have always been problematic for shipping lines and ports.
“Container volumes turn out more resilient than expected this year, despite all headwinds,” said Rico Luman, senior economist for Dutch investment bank ING (NYSE: ING). “But it comes with much more empties.”
Luman said this has been driven in particular by exports from China.
“[T]he disbalance in East-West trade grows even larger, leading to much more empty containers on the backhaul [for which liners earn no revenue],” he said. Growth is strong across the board, but especially in components involved in electrification such as data centers and electric vehicles.
A.P. Moller-Maersk (OTC: AMKBY) Chief Executive Vincent Leclerc in a recent earnings call signaled that total traffic grew even faster than capacity in the first half of the year, and complained that empty-linked congestion at ports and terminals was to blame for liner schedule issues.
“All these empties are also handled by terminals, creating landside pressure and inefficiencies,” Luman said.
Clerc said that worsening east–west trade imbalances are forcing terminals to handle many more empty-container return moves. So even as terminals earn revenue from lines storing empty boxes, Clerc said throughput demand is rising much faster than the reported container-market growth rate.
On Maersk’s August 13 Q2 2026 call, Clerc said that while market growth is about 4% based on loaded cargo, the terminal burden is closer to 7-8% because weak or negative backhaul demand requires “an ever-increasing number of empty containers” to be repositioned.
The number of import containers has surged in Europe, as well. Luman noted that the Port of Rotterdam – the busiest sea hub on the continent – saw the number of empties rocket by 60% in the first six months of this year compared with 2020.
Read more articles by Stuart Chirls here.
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