ContainerSignal Daily: Gemini targets full Suez return by Q1

Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd will launch a Suez-routed service between China and the west Mediterranean on 22 November and expect almost all of the Gemini Cooperation’s services to be back through the Red Sea by the first quarter of 2027. Hapag-Lloyd chief executive Rolf Habben Jansen said at a briefing last week that the phased return has gone smoothly so far and that, if nothing changes, only one or two services would still be routing around the Cape of Good Hope by then. The new loop is the clearest timetable an alliance has given for finishing the return, and it arrived alongside congestion data from Manila and fresh West African surcharges, both reminders that the network is absorbing the shift unevenly.

Today’s Signals

Trade Routes

The new string is called AE18 by Maersk and SE5 by Hapag-Lloyd, and it is designed as a transhipment hub-only service. Its rotation is Shanghai, Xiamen, Tanjung Pelepas, Algeciras, Tangier, Algeciras and back to Xiamen, with the 13,100 TEU Maersk Edirne first away from Shanghai on 22 November. That ship is currently completing her deployment on Maersk’s standalone Asia to Mexico AC2 service. Maersk said the loop, together with AE19, consolidates its west Mediterranean hub coverage and complements its other Asia-Europe strings as well as cargo from Asia to West Africa and South America, The Loadstar reported.

Three existing loops change in the second half of November. Asia to North Europe Loop 1 (Maersk AE2, Hapag-Lloyd NE1) replaces Tangier with Rotterdam as its first European call, which the carriers present as a better service from Ningbo and Shanghai to Rotterdam. Asia-Mediterranean Loop 2 (AE11, SE2) drops its westbound Tangier call in favour of Port Said and adds a pre-Suez call at Salalah. The recently inaugurated Loop 4 adds Damietta, close to Port Said, and replaces Shanghai with Nansha, which fits the twin-hub arrangement Gemini is building at the northern entrance to the canal. These are carrier schedule decisions rather than market forecasts, and the details above come from The Loadstar’s account of the announcement: Maersk’s own advisory page was not readable from this host. The alliance structure behind the reshuffle, in which two carriers share slots on the same loops, is set out in our guide to how shipping alliances work.

Habben Jansen’s timetable is the substantive part. “So far, that has not caused too many problems, it’s been going well,” he said of the services already returned. “If there is no change, I would expect that more or less all of our services will be back through Suez, maybe with one or two exceptions, somewhere in the course of Q1 next year.” Liner analyst Lars Jensen, speaking at the same briefing, put the market-wide normalisation at roughly 30% to 35% of Suez routing, slightly more on the backhaul than the headhaul. Xeneta’s capacity measure told the same story ten days ago, and we covered the doubling of scheduled capacity across Bab el-Mandeb in our 17 October briefing.

Ports

The Port of Antwerp-Bruges handled 10.2 million TEU in the first nine months of 2026, up 1.2% year on year, with the third quarter its best container quarter since the fourth quarter of 2020. The composition is less encouraging than the headline. Empty containers rose 11.7% in TEU while full container throughput fell 1.3%, widening an imbalance that requires more repositioning to Asia, and total cargo across all commodities slipped 0.8% to 200.9 million tonnes, WorldCargo News reported. The port said container exports to the Persian Gulf fell 70% while exports to other parts of the Middle East nearly quintupled, as lines redrew schedules around the region, and that it held a 29% share of the Hamburg to Le Havre range in the first half, down 0.1 percentage points.

Manila’s congestion is a structural problem rather than a seasonal one, according to the Bureau of Customs. Its deputy commissioner for assessment operations, Agaton Uvero, told the Philippine Multimodal Transport and Logistics Association on 19 October that Luzon’s ports bring in more containers than they ship out and that clearing the backlog could take months. Manila International Container Port handled 1.36 million TEU of imports between January and 18 October against about 1 million TEU of exports, or 74% of imports, while the Port of Manila ran the other way at 531,831 TEU in and 674,054 TEU out. Across the two Manila ports and Batangas, imports totalled 2.02 million TEU against 1.81 million TEU of exports, leaving roughly 208,000 more boxes in than out. Import dwell time averages eight days against an ideal of five to six, and Uvero called for lines to deploy sweeper vessels to lift empties, PortCalls Asia reported. Dwell time at a single gateway is one of the inputs behind what schedule reliability measures, and a container surplus of this size is not cleared by better berth productivity alone.

Singapore’s own hub position came with a warning from its most senior shipping voice. Lee Hsien Loong, senior minister and prime minister from 2004 to 2024, told the Singapore Port Workers Union’s 80th anniversary dinner on 18 October that the port’s competitiveness could not be taken for granted and that complacency at PSA International risked losing business to rival hubs investing in automation. Singapore handled almost 45 million TEU in 2025 and 22.7 million TEU in the first half of 2026, up 4.7% year on year, and is consolidating operations at Tuas, which is planned for 65 million TEU of annual capacity by the 2040s, The Loadstar reported. The point has a current edge, since the Gemini redesign routes transhipment for this corridor through Tanjung Pelepas and the Mediterranean hubs instead.

Fleet & Capacity

MSC has reportedly ordered another 20 megamax ships of 24,000 TEU at China’s Hengli Heavy Industries, adding 480,000 TEU of future capacity. Linerlytica, which reported the order in its weekly market report, said MSC has now contracted 62 ships above 20,000 TEU at the Dalian yard and that no contract value, delivery dates or propulsion specification have been disclosed. Alphaliner data cited by Splash 247 put MSC’s operated fleet at about 7.4 million TEU at the end of September, or 21.5% of global liner capacity, with a further 2.94 million TEU on order. Linerlytica estimated the global orderbook at 16.2 million TEU, equal to 46.5% of the existing fleet and the highest ratio since 2009, Splash 247 reported. The order is reported rather than confirmed by the carrier, and the ship size matters because the largest classes are constrained by the ports and channels that can take them, as our guide to how container ships are sized explains.

HMM’s eight 13,000 TEU LNG dual-fuel ships, approved by its board last week, now have a yard split: six at HD Hyundai Samho and two at HD Hyundai Heavy Industries, with deliveries from 2029 and deployment planned on the carrier’s Far East to India to Mediterranean service, WorldCargo News reported. HMM has not published the contract itself, and the value has been reported at between KRW 1.92 trillion and KRW 2 trillion.

Carrier Updates

CMA CGM will apply port congestion surcharges to Tema in Ghana, Freetown in Sierra Leone and Monrovia in Liberia from 1 November, based on the loading date, with shipments from the United States and Brazil applying from 15 November. For dry containers to Tema the charge is EUR 200 or USD 200 per container depending on origin, and dry cargo from the Far East carries USD 200 per TEU. Monrovia carries EUR 250 per dry container from Northern Europe, the western Mediterranean, the Adriatic and North Africa, USD 300 per dry container from the Far East, Indian Subcontinent, Middle East Gulf, North America, South America, the eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea plus specified Central American and Caribbean origins, and reefer levels of EUR 600 or USD 700 per TEU on the same origin groups, Container News reported. The notice covers Freetown on its own origin and equipment schedule, which the article did not itemise.

Regulation & Policy

The 19th implementation meeting of the EU-China Maritime Transport Agreement was held in Shanghai on 19 October, led by Yang Huaxiong, director-general of China’s Water Transport Bureau, and Fotini Ioannidou, director for waterborne transport at the European Commission’s transport directorate. According to the joint press release, the delegations discussed green development of shipping, updates on the international container shipping market, their respective market policies and the resilience of EU-China maritime supply chains, and recognised the importance of stable and predictable conditions. No measures, decisions or timelines were announced.

In Brief

Fire on an ONE-operated ship. ONE reported a fire aboard the 11,923 TEU Espirito Santo Express while it was sailing from Singapore to Santos, saying the head owner had confirmed all crew were safe and that the extent of the incident and any impact on cargo remain under assessment, with the SX1 service affected. WorldCargo News reported that the ship was abandoned and that all 28 crew were rescued, but that the chief officer involved in the rescue operation was lost overboard. The two accounts differ on the casualty and the ship’s status, so neither should be treated as settled, Container News reported.

Salalah concession to change hands. Oman will not renew the concession agreements held by Salalah Port Services Company for the Port of Salalah beyond their expiry on 1 November 2028, which requires a change of operator at the container and general cargo terminals where APM Terminals is a shareholder and provides operational support, WorldCargo News reported. The date is more than two years away; the significance is that a hub used for Gulf relay cargo during the Hormuz disruption will be re-tendered.

India to US exports jump. India’s exports to the United States rose 48% year on year to USD 8.02 billion in September, against an unusually weak September 2025 base of USD 5.42 billion, taking the April to September total to USD 50.81 billion, up 11.11%, Maritime Gateway reported, citing The Financial Express. The Federation of Indian Export Organisations attributed the gain to frontloading ahead of possible further US tariff action as well as the base effect.

What It Means

For shippers, Gemini’s Q1 target is a capacity signal before it is a transit time signal. Each service that moves back through Suez releases ships and boxes that were tied up on the longer Cape routing, which is why Asia-Europe pricing has been tested by carriers with short validity dates while the return proceeded. A timetable that covers almost the whole alliance by the end of the first quarter sets the supply side of the 2027 contracting round, and it does so while 16.2 million TEU of new tonnage is on order. Capacity arriving from two directions at once is the backdrop against which any peak season increase will have to hold.

The network detail matters more than the headline. Cargo that used to reach the Mediterranean through Tangier will now reach it through Algeciras, Port Said or Damietta, and cargo from Ningbo and Shanghai to Rotterdam now has a direct first call at Rotterdam rather than a relay. That shifts transhipment demand between hubs, which is why Salalah’s concession and Singapore’s competitiveness debate belong in the same file as the Suez return: hub volumes follow rotations, and rotations are being redrawn now.

The friction is local and priced. Manila’s eight day dwell and 208,000 TEU import surplus, and CMA CGM’s new congestion charges at three West African ports, are the kind of costs that a quoted ocean rate does not capture until a surcharge appears. Shippers booking into those corridors should expect the charge to be dated from the loading date, not from arrival, which puts the burden on the booking window rather than the terminal.

Sources

• The Loadstar, Gemini signals full Suez return by Q1 as it launches new Asia-Med service
• WorldCargo News, Antwerp-Bruges records highest TEU volumes since Q4 2020
• WorldCargo News, HMM embarks on newbuilding spree
• WorldCargo News, Oman rules out concession renewal for APMT-linked Salalah Port Services
• Splash 247, MSC tipped for another 20 megamaxes in China
• PortCalls Asia, Manila port congestion may take months to clear: BOC
• The Loadstar, Port of Singapore faces new challenges but also new opportunities
• Container News, CMA CGM announces new congestion charges for Tema, Freetown and Monrovia
• Container News, Fire aboard Espirito Santo Express disrupts SX1 service
• European Commission, joint press release on the 19th implementation meeting of the EU-China Maritime Transport Agreement
• Maritime Gateway, India’s exports to US rise 48% in September