Is FOMO driving sentiment in the containership charter market?
The containership timecharter (T/C) market has taken another lurch upwards in recent months, with numerous participants describing a renewed scramble by liner operators - especially the largest European players - to secure any available tonnage.
Most market benchmarks have participated in the recent strengthening, with the assessed one-year T/C rate for MSI's 1,700 teu Grd (geared) Non-Eco benchmark rising from $28,800 a day in June to $34,100/day in September, and our 6,500 teu Gls [gearless] Non-Eco benchmark increasing from $68,400/day to $78,300/day over the same period.
As noted in MSI's Containerships Q3 26 report, the market cooled a little in the second half of September, compared with the height of the northern hemisphere's summer, but this remains a market in which non-operating owners (NOOs) are firmly in the driving seat, and charterers are still willing to fix vessels in the liquid market segments for two-to-three years at healthy rates, and often for forward delivery dates.
Larger benchmarks have generally seen the greatest uplift to broker assessments, despite the paucity of actual fixtures. Broker assessments for 'classic' 4,300 teu panamaxes have whip-sawed a little, but this mostly reflects a situation where market liquidity is thin and concrete fixtures can lead to a quick reassessment of market levels.
The lack of charter market-sized vessels available to hire, in both the near- and medium-term, means an upward movement in rates is the unsurprising outcome of a renewed fixing drive by the major liners.
However, a number of market players have found this renewed rush to hire anything that floats - or is soon to float, in the case of newbuilds from obscure Chinese yards - surprising, and it is prompting people to ask what the liner operators know that the rest of the market doesn't.
The scramble to secure ships is despite an acceleration in plans to route vessels back through the Red Sea, and the knowledge that vessel newbuild deliveries are about to increase substantially, and without respite, until some way into 2029.
For now, the operation of containerships, even expensive chartered ships, remains profitable. The mindset is that, without ships, liner companies may miss out on opportunities to carry lucrative cargo. From an overall cost-per-slot perspective, as well, the economies of scale associated with the larger assets being delivered into liner fleets may also have reduced the marginal impact on overall costs of hiring an additional charter-market ship at an eye-watering rate (which is not to say that chartering teams are happy about this).
In theory, if the larger operators are targeting a stable $/teu vessel cost for all the ships that they operate, deliveries of larger vessels with scale economies in construction and operating costs will allow more 'room' to spend on smaller ships. This may have especially been the case in recent years, given that a good number of the ultra-large ships now on the water were contracted in a much lower newbuild price and interest rate environment.
This won't be true of the ships due to hit the water in the next two-to-three years, and liner operator costs will face upward pressure in the years ahead. We expect this will be one factor that will change the cost-benefit calculation of outbidding each other for expensive charter market vessels.
Liners may also have taken the positive turn in freight markets in recent months as evidence that, ultimately, events will conspire to deliver fleeting periods of elevated profitability, sufficient to offset a leaner overall market environment.
A list of factors that have sapped effective capacity from the fleet in the past several years can also be tied to changes in the global environment beyond shipping, and that seems unlikely to revert to 'normal': recent port congestion in the Far East has been driven by typhoons and extreme weather, and the loss of chokepoint access and, in limited numbers, vessels attacked or seized, has been clearly tied to a more volatile geopolitical environment. It is plausible that discrimination against vessels based on country of build or owner nationality, or cargo origin, could increase further in the years ahead.
As shown below, 'events' and inefficiencies have driven major swings in estimated vessel demand in recent years. And, in terms of market developments in 2026, we estimate that effective vessel demand (+8.8%) will outpace effective fleet growth (+5.7%) this year.
The question, however, is whether 'disruption' will deliver the same results during a two-to-three-year sustained period when liner operators will add colossal volumes of tonnage to their fleets.
Fleet growth has been partly on pause this year, and no plausible supply-side response in the form of scrapping will be sufficient to prevent fleet growth from climbing towards 10% or higher over 2028-29. This is especially the case given that our Q3 Base Case numbers were finalised before liner operators, led by Maersk, boosted the orderbook:fleet ratio by an additional five percentage points.
Our finalised Q3 numbers also underestimated the speed with which liner operators would return to Red Sea sailings - although we did think a normalisation would take place over the course of 2027 (of course, there is no guarantee that the return will be permanent). This will be one factor that, under MSI's modelling framework, will subtract from effective vessel demand at the same time that effective fleet growth accelerates next year.
We have increased our timecharter rate forecasts over 2026-27, but our projections beyond 2027 are broadly stable. We expect better insulation for charter market assets than seen during the market slump in the 2010s, but still expect a significant correction from current market levels. Continued newbuild ordering is increasing the risk of a prolonged market slump into the 2030s.
This is a guest post by Daniel Richards, director of Maritime Strategies International
For more information on MSI's Containerships Q3 Market Report, please contact [email protected]
