Asian Port Congestion Passes Its Pandemic Peak at 4.3M TEU

Container capacity tied up at Asian ports has reached 4.3 million teu on Linerlytica's count, exceeding the roughly 4 million teu stranded at the height of the pandemic. Sea-Intelligence put the effect at about 6.6 percent of the global container fleet unavailable for normal operations in late August: a share of the world's shipping capacity sitting in queues rather than carrying cargo.

The queue is not evenly distributed. Colombo has been the sharpest case, with turnaround times at the deep-water terminals stretched to as much as six days and the pressure concentrated on the two facilities able to take large ships, CICT and CWIT. Yard density and inter-terminal transfer backlogs running as high as 53,000 teu prompted Hapag-Lloyd to warn of 48 to 72 hour delays for window vessels, and to omit the Colombo call on one Maersk voyage entirely, discharging at Singapore instead. CMA CGM issued a customer advisory on 7 September saying the situation was expected to worsen and asking customers to build lead time into anything transiting the port.

Colombo's problem is partly its own success and partly someone else's war. Throughput reached 774,500 teu in July, up 7.3 percent year-on-year, with 5.2185 million teu in the first seven months, up 11.2 percent. Transshipment made up 628,100 teu of the July figure, and transshipment and relay together accounted for 85.4 percent of the month's total. On top of that organic growth has come cargo that can no longer reach Gulf destinations and has been redirected to South Asian gateways. Strong winds have then disrupted berthing on top of the volume. Phase 2 of CWIT is due to complete before year-end, lifting the terminal to around 3.2 million teu a year, but nothing arrives before the current backlog clears.

The Indian gateways are carrying the same diverted flows. Yard density at Nhava Sheva has passed 90 percent with delays up to 48 hours, and Mundra is running above 77 percent with delays up to 24 hours. In China, Hapag-Lloyd has reported waiting times of eight to ten days for some services at the Yangshan terminals of Shanghai, and seven to eleven days on certain services outside the Gemini network, after a run of typhoons triggered the latest backlog.

Underneath the weather sits an arithmetic problem the terminals cannot fix at their own pace. Infrastructure has generally been planned around cargo growth of 3 to 4 percent a year. Chinese export container volumes have grown by roughly 10, 6 and 7 percent in three successive years. A ship can be ordered and delivered in two to three years; a deepwater terminal takes five to ten, because it needs waterfront land, dredging, environmental approvals, concessions, quay, yard, cranes and rail before it moves a box.

The orderbook makes the mismatch worse rather than better. Alphaliner counted about 12.98 million teu across 1,592 vessels on order in June 2026, equal to 38.3 percent of the cellular fleet, with a further 329 ships of about 1.89 million teu contracted in the first half of the year alone. Capacity that cannot be berthed is not capacity.

The effect on rates is already lane-specific rather than general. Shanghai to base ports in Europe has come off to $2,545 per teu, down 3.7 percent week on week as services return through Suez and voyage distances shorten. Shanghai to the US West and East Coasts has gone the other way, to $7,339 and $10,479 per feu. Carriers are responding by adjusting individual strings, rotations and deployments instead of making network-wide capacity changes, which gives shippers more available slots and less predictable schedules at the same time.

This story is part of the Maritime Briefing of 20 September 2026.