TL;DR: Carriers are dodging a capacity crunch in 2026 thanks to geopolitics and frontloading, but a record orderbook means 2027 and 2028 will bring the heaviest delivery wave in years. The twist worth planning around: this time, oversupply may not translate into the falling rates shippers usually expect, because the Strait of Hormuz crisis has reset the industry's underlying cost floor.
The container shipping industry has pulled off the same trick twice before. In 2019, a wave of oversupply was heading straight for the market until the pandemic absorbed it. In 2023, carriers were bracing for a grim 2024 until Houthi attacks in the Red Sea pulled10% of global capacity out of circulation overnight, as vessels diverted around the Cape of Good Hope. Both times, disruption saved the industry from its own orderbook.
At a Journal of Commerce webinar last week, Alan Murphy, CEO of Sea-Intelligence Maritime Analysis, made the case that carriers are running the same play a third time in 2026, and that this may be the last time it works.
Total capacity on order currently sits at 12.3 million TEUs, or37% of the entire active fleet, according to Sea-web data cited on the call. That order book is scheduled to land in two heavy waves:2.3 million TEUs in 2027, then 3.8 million TEUs in 2028. For context, this year's deliveries add up to just over 1 million TEUs from ships above 10,000 TEUs, pushing capacity growth to roughly 4% against initial demand forecasts of 2% to 3%.
Simon Heaney, senior manager of container research at Drewry, framed the coming pressure point plainly: an expected 8.1% expansion of the global fleet in 2027 will land at the same time Suez Canal transits are potentially normalizing, and the combination will "exert substantial downward pressure on market balance."
Murphy modeled three scenarios using Sea-Intelligence data. If Suez and the Red Sea stay off-limits for the next three years, excess capacity lands around 8% to 10%, roughly what the industry saw during the 2014-2017 rate wars. If Suez transits fully normalize by 2027,that climbs to about 20%. Layer in his "horror scenario,"3% demand growth, no scrapping, full Suez normalization, and excess capacity tops 25%.
The reason none of that math is theoretical: scrapping has been close to non-existent for years. Fleet renewal usually cushions an orderbook glut. It isn't doing that job right now.
Here is where this cycle breaks from the last two, and it's the part shippers and procurement teams are most likely to misread if they only skim the headline.
The standard playbook says: oversupply plus a reopened Suez equals a rate collapse. That was the market consensus roughly six months ago, according to Akhil Nair, global head of forwarding at Hong Kong-based Logisteed. But Nair argues that logic assumed the only disruption in play was Red Sea rerouting, which added 10 to 14 days to Asia-Europe strings and was always going to unwind once vessels went back through Suez.
The closure of the Strait of Hormuz changes that calculation. Roughly 21 million barrels of oil a day, about 20% of global petroleum, plus a significant share of LNG, normally move through that waterway. Nair's framing is worth sitting with: a sustained Hormuz closure, or even a credible threat of one, doesn't just reroute tonnage. It reprices insurance and energy, which reprices bunker fuel, which reprices freight on every lane at once. "That is not a routing problem," Nair said. "It is a cost structure problem."
That distinction matters operationally. Blank sailings and slow steaming, the discipline tools a consolidated market of 12 to 13major carriers has used to manage previous disruptions, work against a routing problem. They do very little against a bunker fuel spike that hits every trade lane simultaneously. Nair's conclusion: even as carriers cautiously bring capacity back to Suez, it won't crash rates the way the bears expect, because it's returning into a market whose cost floor has already been reset upward. The Container Trades Statistics global rate index was running 22% higher year over year at the time of the webinar.
It's worth treating any single announcement of a "return to Suez" as provisional rather than a market signal. Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd's own July 6 announcement on the AE15 service, part of the Gemini Cooperation, called it explicitly "a gradual return, "conditioned on the security situation holding and with contingency plans to revert to the Cape of Good Hope route if it doesn't. One service normalizing is not the same as the network normalizing, and the underlying ceasefire in the broader Hormuz conflict remains fragile enough that carriers themselves are hedging their language.
For teams negotiating 2027 service contracts, locking in long-term rates on the assumption that a capacity glut will force carriers to discount is a bet on the old playbook. The cost structure argument suggests carriers may hold rates near the new, higher floor even as vessel utilization loosens, because bunker and insurance costs aren't falling with capacity.
A few things worth putting on the radar now, rather than after the fact:
This article draws primarily on Journal of Commerce reporting(Greg Knowler, July 10, 2026) covering a webinar featuring Alan Murphy (Sea-Intelligence), Simon Heaney (Drewry), and commentary from Akhil Nair (Logisteed) via LinkedIn. Orderbook and fleet data is attributed to Sea-web/S&P Global as cited in the original reporting. Additional context on the Maersk/Hapag-Lloyd AE15 service change and the broader Strait of Hormuz conflict was independently verified against Maersk's own July 6, 2026 statement, Reuters coverage of the announcement, and public reporting on the 2026Iran-Israel-U.S. conflict and its effect on Hormuz shipping. Readers should note that the security and diplomatic situation around the Strait of Hormuz remains fluid at time of writing; any figures or route statuses referenced here should be treated as current as of mid-July 2026, not as settled facts.
Source:https://www.joc.com/article/oversupplied-ocean-carriers-steaming-toward-excess-capacity-after-2026-6251376
