After the Hangover: Container Shipping Learns to Live Without the Supercycle
For a while, container shipping forgot what normal felt like. Extraordinary profits blurred into strategy, and what began as an emergency response to pandemic chaos slowly hardened into a belief that the industry had been permanently re-rated. Now the correction is arriving, not with a crash but with a long, grinding realization that the rules never actually changed. The “structural reset” language coming out of industry circles is less a forecast than an admission: the supercycle is done, and carriers are being dragged back into a business model they briefly escaped.
Losses appearing at Ocean Network Express are an early signal, not an outlier. When weakness shows up before seasonal demand troughs, it usually means the problem is deeper than timing. Freight rates are sagging under their own weight, and no amount of narrative management can disguise the fact that too many ships are chasing too little incremental cargo. Even operators with reputations for restraint, like Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd, are now exposed to the same arithmetic that governs everyone else. Private giants such as MSC may delay the reckoning, but they cannot opt out of market gravity.
The real stress point is capacity. During the boom, ordering vessels felt rational, even conservative, because demand seemed endless and congestion soaked up inefficiency. That illusion has collapsed. Data from Freightos underscores how unusual the current moment is: a historic wave of new tonnage is entering service just as global trade growth cools back toward long-term averages. This is not a short-term imbalance that can be managed with a few blank sailings. It is a multi-year overhang that forces hard choices about pricing, utilization, and capital discipline.
Consultancies are unusually blunt about what this means. Drewry frames the coming period as a reset, implying a break from habits formed during the boom rather than a temporary downturn. That distinction matters. A cyclical slump can be waited out; a structural shift demands behavioral change. AlixPartners has made the same point from another angle, warning that unless carriers restrain investment and resist volume-at-any-cost instincts, they risk recreating the value destruction that defined the decade before COVID.
Complicating matters further is the quiet normalization of global trade routes. As traffic gradually returns to the Suez Canal, effective capacity increases without a single new ship being delivered. Shorter voyages free vessels faster, releasing as much as several percentage points of global supply back into circulation. In a tight market, that would be a gift. In an oversupplied one, it becomes another pressure point that tests whether carriers can coordinate restraint or revert to undercutting.
What makes this moment uncomfortable is how it strips away the narratives built during the boom years. Integration, digitalization, and end-to-end logistics were presented as shields against volatility. They still matter, but they do not cancel out the fundamentals of a business where fixed costs are high and pricing power evaporates quickly. A few weak quarters are enough to remind everyone that diversification does not equal immunity.
The industry now faces a quieter but more demanding challenge than the pandemic itself. Slow steaming, idling, and eventually scrapping will return as necessities rather than tactical options. Shareholders and lenders will rediscover their skepticism. Shippers, emboldened by choice, will push harder on contracts. None of this is dramatic, and that is precisely the point. The supercycle ended not with a bang, but with the slow reassertion of reality.
Whether this reset becomes a period of stability or another prelude to destruction depends on memory. If carriers remember how fragile pricing power really is, they may emerge leaner and more disciplined. If they forget, the industry will relearn the lesson the hard way, once again proving that in container shipping, exceptional profits are always temporary, but the consequences of excess tend to linger.