ContainerSignal

About ContainerSignal

ContainerSignal covers global container shipping and the freight market around it: the ocean carriers, the ports and terminals, the vessels, the trade lanes and the disruptions that move prices.

The aim is narrow on purpose. Containerized ocean freight is one industry with its own economics, its own data and its own vocabulary, and it is served better by a publication that stays inside it than by general maritime news.

What we cover

  • Container rates spot and contract rates, the major freight indexes, General Rate Increases, peak season and fuel surcharges, always tied to a route, a container size and a reporting period
  • Carriers Maersk, MSC, CMA CGM, Hapag-Lloyd, COSCO, ONE, Evergreen, Yang Ming, ZIM, HMM, Wan Hai: services, network changes, capacity and results
  • Ports and terminals congestion, queues, throughput, labour action, expansion and equipment, with official port data where it exists
  • Trade lanes and chokepoints Asia to Europe and North America, transatlantic, intra-Asia, and the Suez, Red Sea, Panama and Hormuz disruptions that redraw them
  • Fleet and capacity newbuild orders, deliveries, scrapping, blank sailings, slow steaming and alternative fuels, with TEU figures kept in their original units
  • Regulation IMO rules, EU ETS and FuelEU Maritime, sanctions and customs changes, with jurisdiction and effective dates named

How we report

Primary sources come first: carrier announcements, port and canal authority statements, IMO and EU material, official indexes and company filings. A second independent source is added before a significant claim is published. Where a report cannot be traced back to the original, that is stated rather than smoothed over.

Confirmed disruption, announced precautionary action, reported possibility and speculation are kept distinct. Freight rates are never generalised from one lane to the world. Numbers are never invented: where a figure cannot be verified, it is omitted. Vessel capacity is quoted as TEU or nominal or deployed capacity exactly as the source does, and units are preserved rather than converted.

Analysis separates what happened from what it means. Any forward view is attributed to a named external analyst or presented explicitly as uncertainty. Nothing here is investment advice or legal advice.

Who's behind this?

I'm Toni. I follow container shipping markets and supply chains, and ContainerSignal is where the daily signal gets written down: what changed, where rates are moving, which routes are disrupted and what it means for shippers.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, it gets fixed and the correction is noted in the post. Open an issue on the site's GitHub repository or get in touch by email.