The market for transatlantic container shipping Westbound could soon experience a marked excess of hold capacity of the ships used on these routes. The considers Sea-Intelligence, a research company that analyzes the global supply chain challenges and, in particular, the containerized shipping segment. The company Singapore notes that transatlantic traffic to the Americas is already under severe pressure and that currently spot freight rates from Rotterdam to New York are at a minimum with the exception of the sharp decline at the end of 2023. Sea-Intelligence specifies that in addition to this, the ongoing weakening of demand, whose growth in September 2025 is expected to be negative year-on-year, and highlights that, nevertheless, current planning of shipping companies indicates that are placing considerable hold capacity on these routes, which - Sea-Intelligence observes - will have a lot of Probably a destabilizing impact.

Sea-Intelligence compared the planned capacity shipping companies for the next 12 weeks with two different demand scenarios. The first is a scenario of growth in demand of 0%, while the second is one optimistic scenario of growth of +5%. The company observes whereas the 0% demand growth scenario is potentially optimistic if the effects of the U.S. trade war should persist. In both cases - Sea-Intelligence specifies - it is expected that the use of ships will collapse to historically low levels, well below of the pre-pandemic one of 2018-2019.

The Singaporean company specified that, based on an 80% correlation between Usage and spot freight rates, projection shows a decline in freight rates in negative territory and noted that, although freight rates obviously will not turn negative, the trend indicates that the market is destined to deteriorate to such an extent that the will be forced to withdraw a significant share of hold capacity to restore greater balance. According to Sea-Intelligence, therefore, shipowners operating in this market should prepare to cope with the high Chances that many scheduled ship departures in the months must be cancelled.