Container orderbook set to hit 16m teu as record year looms

The global containership newbuilding orderbook has passed 15m teu and will close in on 16m teu by the end of the year, according to fresh analysis from Alphaliner.

The trigger is a further 40 or so megamax newbuilding contracts. "Before the end of the year, another 40 or so 'megamax' newbuilding contracts from Maersk, Yang Ming [both expected soon], CMA CGM, and MSC [both believed signed, but yet to be confirmed by Alphaliner] will push the global newbuilding pipeline very close to 16m teu in the last quarter of 2026," Alphaliner wrote today.

How big is the orderbook against the fleet?

Big. Drewry puts the current global fleet at 34m teu, meaning the orderbook already stands at 45% of deployed capacity — before the unconfirmed 40 vessels are counted.

Some 4.9m teu, nearly a third of the total, was ordered this year alone. If the 40 additional ships are confirmed, 2026's tally would likely exceed 5.5m teu and set a new record, beating last year's 5.4m teu.

On the Maersk side, Alphaliner reports the carrier is talking exclusively to Chinese yards, driven by cost and available building slots. "Reportedly, the carrier is looking to place firm orders for 12 ships of 24,000 teu, potentially with options attached for a second series of 12," the analyst wrote.

That tonnage would cost around $240m per vessel at current prices — a potential $2.9bn commitment before options.

Will the capacity wave crash freight rates?

Shippers hoping for a sudden collapse in rates may be disappointed. Lars Jensen, chief executive of Vespucci Maritime, told a Hapag-Lloyd press briefing a few days ago that the coming downcycle looks ordinary, not catastrophic.

"The market is not going to drop off a cliff. When we talk about the market crashing, that would be like what we saw in the financial crisis back in 2008. That, for sure, is not what we're looking at," he said.

"How I would more likely characterise the coming years is as a regular run-of-the-mill cyclical downturn. This is a cyclical industry, it has been ever since it was born, and this is another one of those cycles."

He was blunt on the core problem, though: "So a crash? Absolutely not. But do we have too much capacity compared to what we can absorb? Yes, that is also the case."

What could absorb the new tonnage?

Hapag-Lloyd CEO Rolf Habben Jansen pointed to three mitigating factors: an ageing fleet heading for the scrapyard, stubborn trade growth, and inefficiencies created by trade barriers and tariffs.

"Of course, the orderbook is bigger than it has ever been, but there are a couple of things to keep in mind — one is that the current fleet is aging, so we will start to see scrapping going up. We can debate about when and at what pace, but that's definitely going to come up," he said.

He highlighted the widening imbalance in main container trades — particularly between China's export and import volumes — and the demand growth it reflects.

"There's the growth, especially the growth on some of those dominant legs — when you look at the middle of 2023 until now, the growth on the dominant legs has been about 25%, which is unbelievable," Habben Jansen said. "If you combine that with some of the inefficiencies we see popping up because of trade barriers and tariffs, one cannot rule out that we're going to see another couple of years of pretty decent growth."

Lead times have also stretched to near historic highs as shipyard slots fill up. "If you look at the orderbook today, where traditionally it used to cover two, or two and a half years of deliveries, nowadays it's more like four, or four and a half years. If you order a ship today, you will only get it by 2030," he added.

For carriers and lessors, the message is that tonnage ordered now arrives into a market already digesting record capacity, with scrapping the key swing variable; for shippers, the rate relief from oversupply looks likely to arrive gradually rather than suddenly.