TL;DR: Fog closures in Shanghai and typhoon disruption near Japan tipped an already-strained port network past its limit, pushing global port congestion to a four-year high. The bigger issue isn't the weather — it's that this is happening at the exact moment shippers are frontloading cargo ahead of a tariff decision that hasn't even been finalized yet. That combination is what's actually breaking schedule reliability.
Bad weather closed two terminals in Shanghai for a matter of hours. The knock-on effect lasted ten days. That gap between cause and consequence is the part of this story worth paying attention to.
Almost 11% of the global container fleet, roughly 3.7 million TEUs, was sitting at anchorage as of June 28, according to Linerlytica — a four-year high. Shanghai's Yangshan terminal has seen waits stretch to five days. Vessels calling Shanghai are taking an average of 72 hours to reach berth after arrival, the second-highest figure recorded since August 2024. Carriers including Gemini partner Hapag-Lloyd, ONE, and CMA CGM have started omitting Shanghai, Ningbo, and other Asian ports from services altogether, rolling or transshipping the cargo instead.
That's the recap. What matters more is why it's happening now, and why it's unlikely to resolve itself in the next few weeks.
Fog forced Shanghai's Yangshan and Waigaoqiao terminals to close on June 19. Separately, dense fog suspended pilot services in Ningbo, and typhoon activity disrupted schedules around Japan. None of that is unusual for the season on its own.
What's different this time is the volume sitting on top of it. Shippers have been frontloading cargo ahead of a proposed US tariff action, and that demand surge arrived right as ports lost operating capacity to weather. A carrier can absorb a weather closure. It has a much harder time absorbing a weather closure plus a cargo surge at the same terminal in the same week. Xeneta's chief analyst, Peter Sand, put it plainly: congestion at transshipment hubs like Singapore, Colombo, and Nhava Sheva is now feeding a second wave of the freight rate disruption that started with Red Sea diversions —different trigger, same underlying capacity problem.
This is the part that gets lost in day-to-day port reports. Congestion isn't a single event with a single fix. It's a feedback loop: delays trigger blanked sailings, blanked sailings roll cargo into future vessels, rolled cargo adds to the queue on the next sailing, and rates rise in response to tightening capacity — which then pulls even more frontloaded volume into the system before the window closes.
The single most useful number in this story is one most coverage buries: in Singapore, Hapag-Lloyd reported an average berth wait of15 hours for Gemini alliance services, against 60 hours for non-Gemini services. In Shanghai, the gap was roughly 60 hours versus96 to 120 hours. That's not a rounding difference. It's the difference between a manageable delay and one that blows up a delivery commitment.
If your freight moves on a non-alliance or thinly-scheduled service right now, your exposure to this congestion is materially higher than a shipper on a major alliance loop, even on the same trade lane, even out of the same port. Intra-Asia routes are seeing the sharpest distortion: ONE reported waits of up to 12 days on some services, and a Kobe–Jakarta sailing scheduled for 16 days took 24.Reviewing which service your cargo is actually booked on, not just which carrier's name is on the booking, is worth doing this week rather than after the next missed delivery window.
The frontloading driving part of this surge is happening ahead of a Section 301 tariff action that is still in its comment period, nota finalized rule. The proposal, covering 60 economies at rates of 10%or 12.5%, has a written comment deadline of July 6 and hearings starting July 7, timed to land before the existing 10% Section 122baseline tariff expires on July 24.
That distinction matters operationally. Shippers reacting to a proposed rate as if it were locked in are pulling cargo forward into a port system that's already short on capacity — adding urgency and cost to a decision that could still shift in scope or timing before it takes effect. Treating "proposed" as "confirmed" is understandable given the stakes, but it's also part of what's compounding the current backlog. Tracking the actual rule status, not just the announcement date, should sit alongside any tariff-driven booking decision.
Secondary and intra-Asia routings are absorbing the worst of it —Colombo, Busan, Jakarta, Surabaya, and trans shipment cargo being rerouted through Ningbo to reach Shanghai or Busan-bound freight. Shippers relying on multi-port, multi-week Asia routings have the least room to absorb slippage: a two- or three-day delay early in a three-week voyage is difficult to recover before final delivery, according to one Asia-based carrier executive quoted in the coverage. Mainline trans-Pacific and Asia–Europe cargo on major alliance services is comparatively better positioned, though not exempt —Gemini has already omitted Shanghai on at least one trans-Pacific service.
None of this makes the congestion disappear. It does mean thebusinesses that come out of this peak season with fewer missedcommitments will be the ones that treated this as a planning problemnow, not a status update to wait out.
Source: https://www.joc.com/article/asia-port-congestion-worsens-amid-bad-weather-vessel-bunching-6247280
