Alphaliner: 63% of Far East-Europe Capacity Back via Suez, 24 of 46 Services Returned

The Analysis

Alphaliner counted the month to 15 October and published on 21 October: 63% of deployed Far East-Europe capacity transited the Red Sea, and 24 of the 46 direct services on the trade are back on the short route. BIMCO, quoting Clarksons, put weekly containership capacity through Suez at about 753,000 TEU in the first half of October, against 1.457m TEU in the same weeks of 2023.

Read those three numbers together and one thing is missing from every headline that carried them: the denominator. Sixty-three per cent is a share of deployed capacity on one trade. Slot supply, which is what your rate is made of, is capacity divided by rotation length. Change the rotation and the same ships become more slots.

So we do the division here rather than admire the percentage. Evergreen and ZIM, by the way, are the only large carriers still without a return plan, and that fact matters more than it looks.

The hard numbers first, all in one place. In the month to 15 October 2026, 63% of deployed Far East-Europe capacity transited the Red Sea rather than going round the Cape of Good Hope. Twenty-four of the 46 direct services on the trade are back on the short route. Weekly containership capacity through the canal ran at roughly 753,000 TEU in early October against 1,457,000 TEU in the comparable weeks of 2023, which is 51.7%. Evergreen and ZIM are the only large carriers with no announced return. Those are the facts as published; everything below is arithmetic on top of them, and I will mark every assumption as an assumption.

Begin with a check nobody runs. The 63% and the 51.7% are not measuring the same population, and the press prints them side by side as if they are. Alphaliner's 63% is a share of deployed capacity on the Far East-Europe trade, one trade, measured over a month. Clarksons' 753,000 TEU is a weekly flow of containership capacity through the canal across all the trades that use it: Far East-Europe, Far East-Mediterranean, Middle East-Europe, the Red Sea feeder web, and whatever else is transiting. Put the two against each other and you get a real inference rather than a contradiction: 63 divided by 51.7 is 1.219, so the trade you ship on has come back roughly 22% faster than the canal average. If you move boxes between Asia and North Europe, your lane is ahead of the headline, not behind it.

The gap inside the Clarksons numbers deserves a line of its own. 1,457,000 minus 753,000 is 704,000 TEU a week of containership capacity that used the canal and does not now. That is not a residual, it is roughly the size of the entire weekly capacity of the trade you are reading about, and it is the part of the market still paying for the long way round in fuel, in days and in hulls. If you want one figure for how far this return still has to travel, that is it: not 37% of the trade, but 704,000 TEU a week of shipping that has not come back yet. Every week that figure shrinks, the spare-hull pool grows by the same arithmetic used above, three hulls per service.

Now the denominator. What sets your freight rate is not how many ships exist, it is how many slots arrive per week, and slots per week is capacity divided by the length of the round trip in weeks. Take a stated set of assumptions, because without them nothing here is checkable: a Far East-Europe round trip via Suez runs 63 days, the same rotation via the Cape runs 84 days, a difference of 21 days; the service is weekly; the average ship on the trade is 14,000 TEU. Under those assumptions a Cape routing needs 84 divided by 7, which is 12 vessels to hold a weekly departure. The Suez routing needs 63 divided by 7, which is 9. Returning one service to the short route releases 3 hulls and does not change the weekly slot count on that service by a single TEU, because the service still sails once a week with the same ships.

Multiply it out. Twenty-four services back, three hulls released each, is 72 vessels. At 14,000 TEU that is 1,008,000 TEU of nominal capacity that the trade no longer needs in order to run the same schedule. Cross-check that with an independent method, because one number from one method is an opinion. Weight the two rotations by the capacity split: 0.63 times 63 plus 0.37 times 84 is 39.69 plus 31.08, which is 70.77 days as the trade's average round trip, against 84 if everything were still going round the Cape. That is a 13.23-day cut, or 15.75%. Assume the 46 services each deploy about 11 vessels, so roughly 506 hulls on the trade, and 15.75% of 506 is about 80 vessels spare. Seventy-two from the bottom-up method, 80 from the top-down method, same range, and the gap between them is the rounding in my hull count. I will use 72 to 80 and call it a fleet roughly the size of a mid-sized carrier's entire operation, sitting spare.

Here is the point the headline does not carry, and it is the reason this column exists. Sixty-three per cent is being read as the trade getting back to 63% of normal. That is the wrong reading, and the arithmetic shows why. Nothing about returning to Suez restores 63% of anything. What it does is shorten the denominator. The trade can now deliver the identical weekly slot supply with about 15.7% fewer hulls, which means the fleet is not 63% employed, it is over-employed relative to its own schedule. The correct sentence is not that the trade is two-thirds back; it is that the trade is carrying between 72 and 80 vessels it does not need, and those vessels have to go somewhere.

Where they go is the second half of the point, and it explains a number from a different release. Last week the carriers announced eight blank Asia-Europe sailings against two the week before. Six extra withdrawals, at 14,000 TEU nominal and 85% utilisation, both my assumptions, is about 11,900 TEU per sailing and 71,400 TEU out of one week. Set that against the trade's weekly slot base, which under my assumptions is 46 services times 14,000 TEU, or 644,000 TEU of nominal weekly supply, and the six extra blanks are 11.1% of a week's departures removed in a single move.

Historically a blank was expensive in two ways: you gave up the revenue, and you punched a hole in a rotation that had exactly enough ships in it to work. That second cost has just gone. A carrier holding 72 spare hulls can withdraw a sailing and still hold the schedule, because the hulls are spare. Blanking has stopped being a sacrifice and become a tool, and a tool that costs only the revenue gets used. Expect the eight to be a pattern and not an event.

One more derived figure, and it is the one that tells you who is exposed. Twenty-four services out of 46 is 52.2%. Those 24 carry 63% of deployed capacity. Divide 63 by 24 and 37 by 22 and you get 2.625 against 1.682, a ratio of 1.561: the strings that went back deploy, on average, about 56% more capacity per service than the strings that stayed round the Cape. The reports named Evergreen and ZIM as the holdouts among the large carriers, and the arithmetic says something slightly different from the name-check: what matters is not the carrier's logo but the ship size on the service you book. A shipper on one of the 22 non-returned services is on a rotation that is still 21 days longer, sailing on a string whose average capacity is roughly 36% below the ones that switched. If you do not know which half your cargo is in, ask, because that single fact moves your transit by about ten and a half days each way.

Why now, and why staggered rather than all at once. A service cannot change route mid-rotation; it switches at a rotation boundary, when a vessel completes a voyage and the next departure is scheduled on the new path. That is why the return arrives as 24 of 46 rather than as a switch being thrown. Each service also needs its port rotation, its buffer, and its commercial transit table re-tuned, and every one of those takes a full round trip to settle. The staggered shape is mechanical, not cautious. It also tells you the shape of what comes next: the count goes up in steps of whole rotations, so the next meaningful update is one round trip away, roughly nine to twelve weeks from the 15 October cut-off, and the direction is up rather than down because most of the large carriers have already announced.

Who is affected, and by how much. Receivers in North Europe on a returned service get the transit benefit first, about 10.5 days each way on my 21-day round-trip assumption, and that shows up as stock rather than as freight. Receivers on the 22 services still going round the Cape get nothing, and they are competing for shelf space against importers whose goods arrive a week and a half sooner. Exporters in Asia get a quieter benefit: their European buyer's replenishment lead time just shortened, which is a negotiating fact in the next annual review whether either side mentions it or not.

Then there is the population nobody counts, shippers whose cargo has nothing to do with Europe. Those 72 to 80 spare hulls will be laid up, scrapped, or cascaded onto secondary trades, and cascaded tonnage pushes rates down on whatever lane receives it. If you ship to Latin America, West Africa, or intra-Asia, the Far East-Europe trade's route decision is going to show up in your rate sheet within about two quarters, and it will arrive looking like local competition rather than like Suez.

Timing, then. The blankings bite inside a week, on the sailings that are withdrawn. The rotation shortening works through over one full round trip, so a service that switched in September does not show its settled schedule until somewhere between nine and twelve weeks later; judge a service on its third sailing after the switch, not its first. The contract effect lands at the January reset, which is built from the prints between now and late November, and the capacity effect lands on the secondary trades somewhere in the first half of next year. Three clocks running at three speeds, and the fastest one is the blanking.

A sanity check on the rate consequence, because somebody always asks it. If the freed hulls add nothing to the trade's own weekly slots, why would rates soften at all. They soften because spare hulls are optional capacity, and optional capacity is a ceiling over any scarcity premium. A carrier holding 72 vessels it does not need can switch sailings on inside a week, and a market that can be flooded at will does not pay scarcity pricing for long. The eight blanks are the carriers paying to keep that optional capacity off the market. The firm print on the Europe lanes is being defended with withdrawals rather than earned with scarcity, and a withdrawal is a decision that can be reversed in seven days. That is why the numbers look firm and behave fragile.

Then the fork that decides whether any of this reaches you. Twenty-one freed days can be spent two ways, and carriers choose. Spend them on the schedule and the advertised transit drops by about ten and a half days each way, and your pipeline inventory shrinks. Spend them on slower steaming and the transit table barely moves while the fuel bill drops, and what you receive is more slot supply rather than faster cargo. You can tell which one you are getting from a document you already have: the published service transit table.

Pull the transit your carrier was advertising in August and the transit it advertises today for the same service. If the door-to-door figure has not come down by roughly eight to twelve days, the freed days went into bunkers, and you should plan for capacity rather than for speed. Whether this route stays open for the long run is Ömer Kaya's call rather than mine, and he reads the corridor; I only count what the corridor's arithmetic does to your slot supply.

Run the inventory number, because it is the biggest money in this story and it is not on the freight invoice. Assume an importer bringing 20 40ft containers a week into North Europe, at $40,000 of goods per box, with a cost of capital of 8% a year. Ten and a half days is 1.5 weeks of shipments, so 30 boxes come out of the pipeline permanently, which is $1,200,000 of inventory released once. Carrying that at 8% is about $96,000 a year, or $92.05 per box: $40,000 times 8% times 10.5 divided by 365. Across 1,040 boxes a year that is roughly $95,700. Three assumptions are doing all the work there, the box value, the cost of capital and the 10.5 days, and you should put your own in, but the shape holds: on a mid-sized import programme the transit change is worth more than a freight rate move of several hundred dollars a box, and almost nobody books it anywhere.

What would make this wrong, and it is not a small tail. The return is a routing decision made on a security assessment, and it reverses the same way it was made. If the assessment turns and services revert to the Cape, every one of those 72 to 80 hulls is re-absorbed inside a single rotation, because a longer rotation simply needs them back. Transit goes up by about ten and a half days each way at once, the blanking tool becomes expensive again since the spare hulls are gone, and a trade that had just printed softer rates has to reprice from a much lower base with no slack in the fleet.

The asymmetry matters: going back is a decision, coming out again is an emergency. On the other side, if the 22 holdout services return as well, the spare pool goes to 46 times 3, which is 138 hulls and 1,932,000 TEU, and the blanking tool gets roughly twice as strong. Both ends of that range argue for the same action, which is to stop treating eight blank sailings as an event and start treating them as a standing condition of the trade.

There is a smaller trap inside the same arithmetic, and it catches people who read the percentage as a service-level promise. Alphaliner's 63% is a share of deployed capacity, not a statement that 63% of your sailings go through the canal. A trade can be at 63% by capacity and still have whole services that never see the Red Sea, which is exactly the 22 strings discussed above. Ask your carrier or your NVOCC three things in writing: is the service my cargo is booked on one of the 24 or one of the 22; what is the advertised transit door-to-door today against August; and what happens to my booking if this sailing is withdrawn. That third question is the one that gets answered vaguely, and it is the one worth pinning, because the answer determines whether a blank costs you a roll-over of two weeks or a week of stockout.

So the week's work, in the order I would do it. Pull the transit table you were quoted in August and the one quoted today, and write the difference in days; that number is the only part of this story that lands in your warehouse rather than in your freight budget. Identify which half of the 46 your service sits in, because 21 days of round trip sits on the answer. Recompute safety stock against the shorter pipeline, and if the transit has not actually shortened, do not touch safety stock at all. Then go after the blank-sailing clause in the contract, because that is the piece that converts a carrier's scheduling tool from your problem into a defined remedy: a roll-over window in days, rate protection on the replacement sailing, and notice measured in weeks rather than in whatever the booking terms happen to say.

Sixty-three per cent of the trade went back through the canal and the trade did not get 63% of anything back. It got 21 days out of its own rotation, and 21 days out of a rotation is about 72 ships the trade no longer needs. Those ships are why eight sailings disappeared next week. Follow the denominator and the headline stops being mysterious.

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— By Vivian Zhao