A freight booking can survive a crisis on paper while the delivery plan falls apart. The vessel still exists, the purchase order remains open and the warehouse has a receiving slot. What disappears is confidence in when the cargo can move. That is the transport problem connecting two reports published on November 1, 2026: a severe interruption around Hormuz and a more contained, unsettled situation around Taiwan. For a manufacturer or distributor exposed to both regions, they belong in the same supply-chain review, with different responses attached.

The story everyone expected this year was a boom at the breaking beaches of Alang, Chattogram and Gadani. The tanker fleet is older than it has been in decades, the Hong Kong Convention finally came into force, and carbon rules are squeezing the least efficient hulls. The numbers say otherwise. Clarksons Research counts 273 ships sold for recycling from January to September 2026, about 5.5 million gross tons or roughly 8 million dwt.

The headline everyone will carry is the 7% move and the beat: underlying EBITDA of $3.0bn for the second quarter against a company-compiled consensus of $2.12bn, revenue up 20% year-on-year to $15.8bn, EBIT of $1.6bn versus $845m, group EBIT margin at 10.0%. The number that actually describes the year is buried in the guidance table. Maersk has now raised full-year underlying EBITDA three times — $4.5-7bn on 7 May, $8-10bn on 29 June, $10.

The clearest price signal in the Iran war is not coming from crude. It is coming from box rates on a trade lane that runs nowhere near the Persian Gulf. Spot rates from the Far East to the U.S. West Coast now sit 276% above where they were at the end of February, before the U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran. East Coast rates are up 232% over the same window.

Container capacity on the two biggest East-West trade lanes has largely recovered from the disruption caused by the Iran war, yet spot rates are still running well above pre-crisis norms. That combination — normalized sailings alongside stubbornly elevated pricing — is the clearest sign that this year’s rate strength has shifted from a pure supply shock to a demand-and-surcharge story. The Numbers Right Now On the transpacific, Shanghai to New York spot rates climbed 11% week-on-week to $7,902 per 40ft container, while Shanghai to Los Angeles rose 10% to $6,349.

Container spot freight rates jumped again this week, pushing global benchmarks to their highest levels since the pandemic-era peak of 2022. Drewry’s World Container Index rose 9% week-on-week to $4,530 per 40ft container, with gains concentrated on the transpacific and Asia-Europe trades. S&P Global’s Platts Container Index corroborated the move, climbing 80% over the 30 days to June 24 to its highest reading since April 2022. The transpacific is leading the surge.

Oil tankers moving through the Strait of Hormuz do not operate in a vacuum. Every voyage is backed by layers of maritime insurance that quietly absorb the financial risks of shipping millions of barrels of crude through narrow waterways and politically volatile regions. Most of the time those costs remain relatively stable, just another operational line item for shipowners and energy traders. But when tensions rise in the Strait of Hormuz, the insurance system reacts almost instantly, and the price of moving oil through the corridor can jump dramatically.

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.

There’s a particular moment in corporate life when a public company suddenly stops acting like a public company and starts signalling that it’s weighing its exit. ZIM hit that moment this month. The rejected take-private bid from its own CEO, Eli Glickman, together with shipowner Rami Ungar, wasn’t just another headline from a cyclical industry desperate for narrative oxygen. It was the clearest sign yet that insiders believe the market is undervaluing the company at what they see as a trough in the global logistics cycle.

BEAVERTON, Ore., July 17, 2024 - Spot truckload rates rose in June despite declines in the number of loads moved, said DAT Freight & Analytics, which operates the DAT One freight marketplace and DAT iQ data analytics service. The DAT Truckload Volume Index (TVI), an indicator of loads moved during a given month, retreated from all-time highs for van and refrigerated (“reefer”) loads in May: Van TVI: 266, down 9% month over month Reefer TVI: 199, down 11% Flatbed TVI: 279, down 7% Year over year, the van and flatbed TVI dipped 3% and 5%, respectively.