Freightos has cast 2025 as a year defined by two things shippers dislike most: shipping delays and freight cost increases. That's the blunt framing from the freight booking platform's outlook, and it lands at a moment when the industry has already absorbed years of disruption. No one gets a soft landing.

The headline matters because Freightos sits on real transaction data. Its indexes — the Freightos Baltic Index for ocean and the Freightos Air Index for air — feed rate visibility to thousands of forwarders and BCOs. When a platform of that scale frames the whole year around delay and cost, it's not editorial mood. It's a read of what its booking flow is showing.

What's driving the 2025 pressure?

The short version: tariffs and geopolitics are still in charge. US tariff policy under the Trump administration has been the dominant swing factor for transpacific planning since early 2025. Shippers pulled cargo forward ahead of announced tariff rounds, which is a familiar playbook — and one that reliably distorts capacity in both directions.

That whipsaw is the mechanism behind delays. Frontloading empties out later-month bookings, then triggers a rush when deadlines move. Carriers respond by blanking sailings and then re-injecting capacity, and the schedule reliability that carriers spent 2024 rebuilding takes the hit. Forwarders get the remedial work: rebooking, re-routing, explaining.

Costs follow the same logic. Demand spikes on tariff deadlines push spot rates up on lanes like Shanghai–Los Angeles and Shanghai–New York. When the deadline passes or the policy shifts again, rates sag — but rarely back to where they started. The floor keeps ratcheting, and contract negotiations inherit the damage.

What does this change for shippers?

Practically, it changes the planning horizon. If delays and cost increases are the baseline rather than the exception, then the old just-in-time posture becomes a liability. Shippers who treated 2024's normalization as a return to normalcy have been reminded that normalcy is a rental, not a purchase.

The reasonable responses aren't exotic:

• Build longer lead times into transpacific and Asia–Europe replenishment cycles.
• Treat tariff calendar dates as capacity events, the way peak season used to be treated.
• Lock contract coverage earlier in the negotiating window, before spot spikes bleed into benchmark talks.
• Diversify origin mix where the tariff exposure is concentrated, rather than betting on a single exemption outcome.

For carriers, the picture cuts both ways. Firm demand and tighter effective capacity support earnings — but schedule reliability complaints and regulatory attention to blank sailing practices come bundled. For forwarders, volatility is margin opportunity and operational headache in equal measure. Somebody has to rebook the freight.

The air freight echo

Ocean disruption rarely stays in ocean. When transits stretch or shippers miss tariff windows, air freight absorbs the overflow, and air rates rise accordingly. E-commerce volumes out of China have already been a structural driver of air capacity demand, and any enforcement shifts around de minimis treatment of those parcels would redirect significant tonnage. The knock-on effects never stay neatly in their lane.

This is where a delay story becomes a cost story. A missed vessel becomes an air shipment, and an air shipment costs a multiple of the ocean rate it replaced. Budget planners who model ocean rates alone are modeling half the exposure.

What to watch from here

The variable that decides how 2025 actually plays out isn't carrier behavior or port congestion — it's tariff policy, and that remains genuinely unpredictable. Freightos's framing of a delay-and-cost year assumes continued policy churn. If deadlines stabilize and exemptions settle, some of the pressure relieves; if they escalate, transpacific rates and transit variability worsen in step.

Shippers' best move is boring and effective: watch the tariff calendar the way they watch typhoon season, and treat every announced deadline as a capacity event until proven otherwise. The rates, as ever, will keep score.