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ContainerSignal Daily: Evergreen returns to Suez after three years

By ContainerSignal Editorial · · 10 min read

Evergreen put its first containership through the Suez Canal in nearly three years, with the 16,556 TEU Ever Eon transiting on 8 November while sailing from the Netherlands to Singapore. Container News reported the transit on 9 November, citing the Suez Canal Authority, which said the 369 metre vessel operates on the Ocean Alliance’s NEU7 loop between the Far East and northwest Europe. The canal authority’s chairman, Admiral Ossama Rabiee, said Evergreen intends to route further voyages through the canal in the coming period.

The transit is the point at which an announced return becomes an operating fact. Evergreen disclosed the plan on 6 November, and the ship has now sailed, leaving Zim as the only major carrier still routing Asia-Europe services around the Cape of Good Hope and Premier Alliance’s first Suez sailing, Yang Ming’s YM Trust from Ningbo, as the next scheduled milestone on 13 November.

Today’s Signals

Trade Routes

The capacity effect of a Suez routing arrives with the voyage, not the announcement. A shorter Asia-Europe round voyage means each loop needs fewer ships for the same weekly frequency, so the same fleet carries more cargo once the ships are actually transiting. Evergreen’s return adds to a shift that the analysis of the half-finished Suez return set out in October: the release is gradual, reversible, and lands as effective capacity rather than as an orderbook number. Drewry’s assessment for 5 November already had 60% of Asia-Europe capacity on the Suez route, so the Ever Eon is joining a corridor that is filling rather than opening it.

Hapag-Lloyd’s ASX loop on Asia to east coast South America skips Shanghai and calls Tanjung Pelepas. The rotation is Qingdao, Ningbo, Shekou, Tanjung Pelepas, Santos, Itajaí, Rio Grande, Paranaguá, Santos and Singapore, according to an analysis by Nils Roche in the Loadstar on 9 November, which notes that rivals on the trade use Singapore, 30 miles away. Roche calculates that the withdrawal of the Maersk and CMA CGM ASAS2 loop in December cuts nominal weekly capacity from Asia on the trade by about 6%, and that MSC replacing Hapag-Lloyd’s five ships on the Ipanema loop in April, alongside a new Hapag loop at similar ship sizes, adds roughly 10,000 TEU a week. Shippers signing annual contracts this winter should not treat December’s tighter market as permanent, he wrote.

Fleet & Capacity

Sea-Intelligence puts the container fleet at 50m TEU by 2030, and the delivery schedule is the reason. Analysis reported by Splash on 9 November has the fleet growing from about 34m TEU today to 40m TEU by the second quarter of 2028 and 50m TEU by the third quarter of 2030, with quarterly newbuilding deliveries averaging 1m TEU between 2027 and 2030 and peaking at 1.8m TEU in the third quarter of 2028. Scrapping offers limited relief. Repeating the record demolition levels of 2016 every year through 2030 would absorb less than 17% of the incoming capacity, leaving annual fleet growth averaging 8.5%, and 10.8m TEU would still be aboard ships older than 20 years in 2030.

Add the effective capacity released by the Suez return, which Sea-Intelligence puts at about 8%, and cumulative supply growth could exceed 50% by the end of the decade. The consultancy reads the ordering wave as positioning for scale after 2030, potentially ahead of an alliance restructuring, with MSC’s size showing that a carrier can operate without partners, a point the guide to shipping alliances covers in more detail. Carriers can only offset the supply with commercial levers such as blank sailings, and the forecast lands a day after Xeneta’s 2027 outlook, reported here on 8 November, which assumed 6.8% fleet growth against demand growth of 2.5% to 4%.

A2B-online doubled its newbuild programme with two methanol-capable shortsea ships in China. The Dutch operator ordered the pair at China Merchants Industry Weihai, adding to two 650 TEU ships booked at Turkey’s Sedef shipyard in 2023, Splash reported on 9 November. The new vessels will have multi-fuel methanol propulsion, shore power connections and batteries, will run between Moerdijk in the Netherlands and Tilbury, Immingham and Teesport, and are designed to carry about double the cargo of the older tonnage without much extra length. No price, delivery date or capacity was disclosed. The existing fleet is seven Sietas-built ships dating from 1995 to 1999, which the four-ship programme replaces.

Freight Rates

Hapag-Lloyd posted three charges across the Indian Ocean, the Pacific and West Africa, with effective dates from 6 November to 1 December. Container News reported on 8 November that the carrier set a peak season surcharge of US$500 per container on refrigerated cargo from Karachi and Port Qasim to the UAE, Bahrain, Oman, Iraq, Kuwait and Qatar, running from 16 to 30 November and applying to 20ft and 40ft high-cube reefers. It also set a general rate adjustment of US$1,000 per container from the Indian subcontinent, Pakistan and the Middle East to North America for containers gated in full from 1 December, and a peak season surcharge of US$400 per TEU from Asia and Oceania to Tema in Ghana from 6 November.

These are posted charges rather than collected revenue, and they sit outside the weekly index levels, a distinction the guide to container freight rate indexes sets out. Whether the December adjustment is paid depends on space and on what the carriers running the same lane do with their own tariffs.

Regulation & Policy

Indian brokers are threatening a boycott over how carriers collect empty container charges. The Loadstar reported on 9 November that Maersk more than doubled its lift-on/lift-off (lo-lo) charges for empty boxes at Mundra from 1 November, from US$23 to US$51 per 20ft empty and from US$31 to US$67 per 40ft empty, plus local taxes, and that other lines are expected to issue similar notices for their empty operations at India’s busiest container port. At Chennai, the Chennai Customs Brokers Association said MSC has led a practice of collecting empty container charges through third-party depot vendors, and has threatened to boycott MSC shipments if the practice is not reversed by 15 November. The association said its members were being caught between carriers and customers who refuse to reimburse the add-ons.

Ports

A.P. Moller Capital is buying terminal networks, though not through the liner. The Maersk group’s infrastructure investment arm agreed on 15 October to buy Portek International from Japan’s Mitsui & Co, a business with interests in seven terminals in Algeria, Gabon, Indonesia, Latvia, Malta and Vietnam, and on 28 September to take majority control of Euroports, a network of more than 50 deep-sea and inland terminals across 10 European countries and China handling more than 70 million tonnes a year, FreightWaves reported on 6 November. Both portfolios are weighted to bulk and breakbulk, and sit outside APM Terminals, so this is diversification by the investment arm rather than a change in Maersk’s container terminal estate.

What It Means

For shippers on Asia-Europe, the supply side is now delivering on two fronts at once. Suez routings shorten voyages and release ships per loop, and the orderbook keeps adding hulls regardless of where they sail. That combination is why carriers are pushing November increases that forwarders doubt will hold, and why the practical question for a 2027 contract is not whether space will exist but what the base rate should be if effective capacity keeps rising.

On Asia to east coast South America the timing is the opposite, and briefly. December’s service change tightens the trade by roughly 6% of nominal weekly capacity on one analyst’s count, and April brings it back with interest. A contract priced on December alone would be a contract priced on a four-month distortion.

The charges matter in a different way. Announced surcharges and rate adjustments are cost inputs that a shipper can plan around, provided it checks the container type, the gate-in date and the origin and destination pair, because the three Hapag-Lloyd measures above apply to different cargo and different effective dates. Empty container handling fees at Indian ports are harder to plan around, since they are levied locally and, in Chennai’s case, collected through third parties, which is what the brokers are objecting to. Exporters booking out of Mundra or Chennai should establish who bills the empty lift and on what tariff before the dispute escalates.

What to watch this week: whether Evergreen adds loops beyond the NEU7 transit, whether Premier Alliance’s 13 November sailing goes ahead as scheduled, and whether other carriers copy the Mundra empty container tariff, which would turn a single carrier’s local charge into an industry-wide cost line on Indian exports.

Sources

Background reading

The explainers behind today's stories, if you want the fundamentals first.

The container surplus comes in two waves. Only one can be undone

Routing capacity returns in weeks and can be reversed, while the orderbook returns in years and cannot. That split separates the 2027 and 2030 rate outlooks.

Asia-Europe rates are riding a half-finished Suez return

Sixty-three percent of Far East to Europe capacity now uses Red Sea routings, but many loops still return via the Cape. That gap explains the rate rebound.

The transpacific premium is mostly a capacity decision

Asia-US East Coast spot rates are more than three times Asia-North Europe. The gap reflects blanked capacity and Red Sea routing more than a demand boom.

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