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17 February 2025 – Uncertainty has become the new normal in the container shipping industry, with recent years defined by unpredictable disruptions and black swan events.
Container shipping acts as a mirror to world events and shifts in economic cycles. In recent years it has had to adapt swiftly to numerous (and often concurrent) disruptions such as COVID-19 and attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea. It has to find fixes for pressing problems like the loss of Suez Canal transits as well as planning ahead for potential changes in trade patterns brought about by trade wars, sanctions, and regional conflicts.
“Stakeholders have become conditioned in recent years to expect the unexpected, and the only safe forecast we at Drewry can offer is that next year will deliver more unforeseen challenges,” said Simon Heaney, Drewry’s senior manager, container research, about the outlook for 2025, examining how the industry is adjusting to these challenges and what the future holds in an environment where unexpected events are increasingly shaping global trade.
How might President Donald Trump’s trade policies impact the shipping industry?
It is hard to ignore the sense of the world creeping towards a new era of hyper-protectionism. The most obvious symbol of this is the return of the self-proclaimed ‘Tariff Man’ Donald Trump as the US president, but discontent with free trade and globalisation has been simmering for a long time, particularly in the West. He is just particularly adept at tapping into that anger.
“In our view, the direction of travel remains up for grabs, and global trade is likely to oscillate between different degrees of freedom. It is much easier to point out flaws in a system than devise a better one, and while Trump may feel he has a mandate to rip up the rule book and multilateral agreements, his ‘madman’ approach is a risky economic experiment that could be potentially very damaging for trade. Towards the end of his tenure, enough voters may well decide that actually, the old approach (or an improved version of it) was preferable after all.
“The biggest problem from a forecasting perspective is that nobody knows how closely Trump will stick to his campaign policies that are more often than not light on detail. Investors and business leaders seem to think his tariff threats are merely a negotiating tactic, all just part of the Trump show. His core voters, on the other hand, appear to believe he will actually deliver. Both cannot be right.”
What are the key trends to watch in 2025?
Heaney: “Our demand forecasts do assume that there will be an element of front-loading and inventory stock-piling in 2025 as cargo owners prepare for whatever tariff announcements are thrown at them.
“Another interesting change that we can see ahead is the start of new liner alliance structures from February. The most interesting of these is the Gemini Cooperation between Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd, which has some echoes with Trump in the sense they clearly think the current way of doing things is inefficient. Unlike Trump, they have a clear alternative plan with a bold network redesign that takes the hub and spoke model to the extreme and aims to increase schedule reliability from about 50% today to 90% (for mainline ships) and 80% (for end-to-end connections).
“We shall find out soon enough if the industry’s chronic low on-time reliability can be fixed, or not. A lot is riding on this for the Gemini carriers in terms of reputation, but if they are successful, it could trigger a more widespread network redesign that could lead to a two-tier pricing model that puts a premium on more reliable services.” Source: World Cargo News