Drewry: Suez Transits Hit 62 Vessels a Week, Only 2 Cleared Hormuz

The Analysis

Drewry's index note of 30 October puts four numbers on the table and buries two more. Suez Canal transits ran to 62 vessels last week, the highest weekly count of 2026. Two ships passed the Strait of Hormuz inside the same seven days. Shanghai to Jebel Ali stayed at 8,584 dollars a container. The intra-Asia index added 46 dollars to 1,504, which the note describes as roughly 200 per cent above a year earlier. Further down, average berth waiting at Ho Chi Minh City stretched from eight hours to 22 across the fortnight ending in Week 43, and Jakarta to Shanghai gained 9 per cent to 81 dollars.

Set the first two side by side and the story stops being a recovery story. Sixty-two against two is not one channel healing faster than another. One of those counts moves because it is a routing decision every alliance revisits each rotation, and a rotation is short enough to reverse. The other does not move because it was never an economics decision: it is the count of owners willing to put a hull, a crew and your boxes inside a war risk endorsement that most of the fleet declines, at a premium repriced per transit with a validity window counted in days. Carrying the Red Sea recovery across into the Gulf is arithmetic done on two different instruments, and it produces confident nonsense with a decimal point in it.

The damage lands on the third number. Eight thousand five hundred and eighty-four to Jebel Ali did not move while the transit count behind it sat at two a week. A quoted rate that refuses to move while the risk underneath it changes shape is a rate that is not carrying the risk. Whatever is carrying it sits on lines your rate agreement probably does not mention.

Most of these figures hold up under ten minutes with a calculator. Two do not, and one of the two is the number every headline led with.

One discipline note before the arithmetic. Every figure below is used exactly as printed. Where a number carries no published denominator I give you the range rather than picking a middle and passing it off as a measurement.

Start with the count everybody is quoting, because it is the least able to carry the weight being put on it. Sixty-two vessels in a week is 8.9 ships a day. Against any pre-disruption baseline you care to hold, that is a fraction, and the note supplies no baseline at all, so each reader fills the gap from memory. Memory is not a source. The only honest question to ask of a weekly high is what the rest of the distribution looked like. If weekly counts have run inside a band all autumn and 62 is the ceiling of that band, then it is a high in the way Tuesday is a high: one operator shifting a string, or one convoy slot reshuffled, moves the count by five units in either direction and you would not know it from the number.

The count is also the wrong unit entirely. What reaches your rate is effective weekly slots landing at a berth on a predictable day. Sixty-two ships averaging 12,000 TEU is 744,000 TEU of nominal weekly capacity touching that routing; drop the average to 8,000, which is what you get if the count includes feeders and mid-size tonnage rather than headline strings, and it is 496,000. Same week, same headline, a 50 per cent difference in the only figure that matters. The vessel mix was never published, so the 62 carries a confidence interval nobody quoted, and that interval is doing all the work.

Whatever the tonnage, it does not reach your rate this month. Ship time freed by a shorter rotation returns to the network in a fixed order: better schedule integrity first, then restored fixed-day departures, and spare tonnage hunting for cargo last. That order is why a recovery count can print for eight or ten weeks before a rate reacts, and why whoever bought freight in week three of a recovery usually paid for the privilege.

Now to the other number. Two. If you ship into the Gulf, two is not low, it is a different state of the world. Two means the liner route has stopped being a liner route and is running on exceptions: whoever sails does so under a war risk endorsement most of the fleet has declined, priced per transit, valid for days. Two does not improve because counting improves. Two improves when the insurance line moves, and the insurance line is in neither your freight quote nor your contract.

Take the 8,584 apart, because this is where invoices bleed. A quote of this shape is a stack: base freight, fuel adjustment, terminal handling at both ends, documentation, whatever this month's disruption surcharge is called, and outside all of it, marine war risk. Part of that stack is inside the figure described as held; part is not. When Shanghai to Jebel Ali prints unchanged while two ships a week are making the transit, read it as the base being pinned. Carriers pin base on lanes with thin account lists because cutting it wins no cargo and raising it loses the handful of accounts still moving. So the risk does not escape through base freight. It escapes underneath.

One more check on that pinned base, because it settles an argument people keep having. Compare the two lanes quoted in the same note. Jakarta to Shanghai is 81 dollars a box. Shanghai to Jebel Ali is 8,584. That is 106 to 1. Distance explains none of it: Jakarta to Shanghai is roughly 2,900 miles and Shanghai to Jebel Ali better than 6,000 on the usual routing, a factor of about two against a factor of 106 in price. You are not buying ton-miles on the Gulf leg.

You are buying equipment imbalance, because a trade that imports far more boxes than it exports has to have those boxes brought in at whatever repositioning costs, layered with war risk, over a carrier list short enough that three withdrawals set the price. The things worth watching follow directly: count the carriers still calling the port each week, and track the gap between what the head leg earns and what it costs to get the empty out again. Neither of those is anybody's headline.

Then check whose numbers you are even reading. Carrier rates are quoted to the party named on the bill, and if a forwarder's house bill sits between you and the master, what moved in a week like this may be someone else's margin rather than a rate. Ask, once, for a split of carrier charge against forwarding charge on one representative shipment this week. It takes four minutes, and it is routinely the largest unexplained number in the room.

There is a second consequence of two-a-week that costs real money and appears in no index. At two transits a week, most Gulf-bound boxes go to an alternative gateway and finish by feeder or by road. The through-rate you were quoted to Jebel Ali assumed a direct call. Once the routing changes, either the quote no longer buys what you think it buys, or the transit clock you planned inventory against stretches by ten days to two weeks with nothing attached to compensate you, because a spot booking carries no guaranteed transit. Tomás Ferreira tracks exactly this kind of node substitution on the landside; my interest stops at the arithmetic, and the arithmetic says a routing change is repriced at the carrier's option.

Here is the part no headline printed, and it is the one costing people money right now. Your rate agreement runs for three, six or twelve months. The two things actually moving this month reprice every seven days. A war risk line is quoted with a validity window; a berth wait at Ho Chi Minh went from eight hours to 22 inside fourteen days, which is a weekly variable if ever there was one. Nothing in a standard fixed-rate clause caps either. You are signing a six-month document that governs the one component of your freight cost that has stopped moving, while the two components that will move sit outside it with no ceiling and no notice period. Every renewal cycle is a free option written to the carrier: they reprice, you absorb. Carriers are not being villains here. They priced the paper you offered, and nobody forced you to leave two thirds of the cost outside the agreement.

Writing the cap is less exotic than it sounds. Three sentences get you most of the way there: any charge not enumerated in the schedule requires fifteen days written notice and cannot exceed an agreed dollar figure a container; any war risk or emergency line follows the carrier's documented cost from a named source and moves down as well as up; and either side may re-tender if any single line moves more than an agreed amount inside a quarter. Carriers will argue the ceiling and accept the notice period, which is fine, because the notice period is what lets you re-tender before the price lands. You do not have to win all three clauses. You have to win one of them.

Now the intra-Asia arithmetic, which has a genuine defect in it. The index is 1,504 after adding 46, so last week it was 1,458 and the week-on-week move is 3.15 per cent. Fine. Then: roughly 200 per cent above a year earlier. That phrase has two readings and they are not close. Read it as 'up by 200 per cent' and last year's index was 1,504 divided by three, which is 501. Read it as 'at 200 per cent of' and last year's number was 752. Nobody published the base, so nobody can tell you which it is, and the gap is 251 dollars of index. It also changes the momentum you derive: 46 dollars of weekly gain is 9.2 per cent of a 501 base and 6.1 per cent of a 752 base. One describes a lane running hot, the other a lane on a steady climb, and they justify completely different contract durations.

The composite figure has the same netting problem in reverse. The headline has global container rates down 3 per cent while the intra-Asia index is up 3.15 per cent. Assume the intra-Asia index carries some weight inside that composite — call it 5, 10 or 20 per cent, since I am not given the weighting — and solve for the rest. At 5 per cent weight, everything outside intra-Asia fell 3.32 per cent. At 10 per cent, it fell 3.68 per cent. At 20 per cent, it fell 4.54 per cent. So the lanes most readers actually book did not ease 3 per cent. They eased between 3.3 and 4.5 per cent, and the headline number is the small one.

Before any of that goes into a 2027 budget, note there is a third reading of the 200 per cent nobody raised: index methodologies get re-based and lane baskets get re-weighted, and either leaves the year-on-year comparison intact in form and broken in substance. Asking the publisher for last year's actual print costs one email. The people who skip that email carry somebody else's arithmetic into a board pack and defend it for a year.

Then the two buried numbers, which explain each other and explain the 9 per cent. Average berth waiting at Ho Chi Minh went from eight hours to 22 across a fortnight. Run that as a weekly service with one call per week and a 168-hour cycle: waiting absorbed 4.8 per cent of the ship's week and now absorbs 13.1 per cent. Nothing else changed, so either the rotation lengthens by the 14 hours of extra wait or you lose departures. At 168 hours you get 52 departures a year; at 182 you get 48. That is 7.7 per cent of the year's capacity off the lane. Add a vessel to protect the fixed-day departure instead and you have put roughly one extra ship into a string that used to need seven, which is about 14 per cent more tonnage cost on the service.

Hold that 7.7 per cent against the Jakarta to Shanghai move of 9 per cent to 81 dollars. Those two numbers are the same number. The intra-Asia increase here is not demand; it is 14 hours of berth queue converted into capacity withdrawal, and it is a rounding error away from matching. That distinction is worth money, because a congestion-driven rate is reversible at the speed congestion built — eight to 22 hours took a fortnight, so 22 back to eight can take a fortnight. A demand-driven rate is not. Lock six months of intra-Asia at a number set by a queue and you have bought the top.

Now tie the waiting hours to your own calendar, which is where 22 hours stops being a statistic. Most boxes out of Ho Chi Minh are not end to end; they ride a feeder to a hub and load onto a mother vessel for the long leg. If your cut-off to that connection was built on eight hours of waiting plus a defined truck window, and waiting is now 22, the probability of missing the connection moves on exactly one variable. Missing it costs a sailing, and a sailing on a weekly hub service is seven days. Work the cheap fix out at your own numbers.

Assume 25,000 dollars of goods in a box and carrying cost at 10 per cent a year: fourteen hours of extra waiting is 0.58 days, which is about 4 dollars a box of carrying cost per shipment, so 40 boxes a month is some 160 dollars a month to hold the buffer. Put that next to one missed connection, which at seven days of delay and a markdown or an air leg at the far end can run four figures a box. The buffer costs four dollars. The roll costs four figures. Nobody budgets the buffer. Everybody eats the roll.

Nor is 81 dollars evidence of anything about demand. Eighty-one dollars a box for Jakarta to Shanghai, at maybe 2,900 nautical miles, is below what two terminal handlings cost in most of those ports — check your own THC lines and see what is left for the sailing itself. An increase of 7 dollars on that client base is the echo of blanked sailings, not receivers bidding.

Put your own exposure on the sheet. Assume you move 40 boxes a month Shanghai to Jebel Ali at 8,584. The quote is flat, so nothing leaks through freight; it leaks through the lines nobody capped. Assume one of them steps 150 dollars a box on a renewal, an assumption you should replace with your own invoice history. Forty boxes times 150 is 6,000 dollars a month, and over a six-month agreement with monthly resets the distribution is centred there and open upward. At 100 boxes a month Jakarta to Shanghai fixed for six months at 81 while spot gives back to 74 within two months, you pay 7 dollars a box on 400 boxes of the remaining term: 2,800 dollars of freight for capacity restored by a berth window opening.

Where does this break the other way? Give yourself thresholds rather than convictions. If strait transits move from two into the twenties and stay there for a month, the war risk line collapses, and a one-month agreement turns from protection into a cost — you would have wanted three months then. If the Suez count prints above 60 for four consecutive weeks and, critically, vessel mix is published and skewed large, treat the released tonnage as permanent and start pricing its arrival into Europe lanes. If Ho Chi Minh waiting drops back under twelve hours, assume the intra-Asia lift unwinds inside two to three sailings and do not renew at the peak.

The 62 and the 2 will keep being printed in the same paragraph because they make a neat sentence. They are not one subject. One is carriers doing arithmetic on bunkers and berth windows. The other is an insurance market, and your freight contract does not reach it.

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— By Vivian Zhao