Are Ports Becoming the Real Capacity Constraint?

More ships are coming. The bottleneck may be on land.

The container fleet keeps growing.

It was already 5.4% larger y-o-y in Q2.

Yet port congestion is absorbing ~2m TEU of capacity.

That is almost 5% of the global fleet.

More ships are coming.

That matters for rates, reliability and how much of the fleet is really available.

So why can capacity still feel tight?

Could the next constraint be on land?

Here are 5️⃣ signals behind it:

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1️⃣ Cargo grew faster than terminals

Far East headhaul volumes have grown around 25% since 2024.