1.7 Million TEUs Vanished: How Port Delays Are Strangling Global Shipping

The global container shipping industry is haemorrhaging capacity, not to scrapping or lay-ups, but to port delays that have quietly swallowed the equivalent of the world’s eighth-largest carrier. New data from Sea-Intelligence reveals that 5.0% of all deep-sea container slots are now tied up in congestion, a structural shift that has erased 1.7 million TEUs from active service. Before the pandemic, the industry operated with a stable baseline: 2.2% of capacity was routinely absorbed by delays, a figure carriers accepted as the cost of doing business. Schedule reliability hovered between…

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