Carriers are racing back to Suez – and it could sink their own freight rates

Alt. headline: Maersk, Hapag and the Suez Canal return: market share versus freight rates

Alt. headline: Fewer port calls, bigger bets: how carriers are rewiring their networks

CMA CGM never left, and now Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd are following it back through Suez. Defending market share may cost the whole sector its pricing power.

The Suez Canal return is no longer a rumour; it is a race. Maersk has rerouted its Middle East–US East Coast MECL service back through the canal, its Gemini AE15 loop is transiting again, and the 18,300-TEU Majestic Maersk was set to sail north through Suez on 12 July. The trigger is competitive, not calm: CMA CGM never stopped, kept a two-week transit-time edge with French naval cover, and started taking share. Maersk moved to defend it.

Rational for each, ruinous for all

Here is the trap. Returning to Suez shortens the round trip, cuts fuel, and frees vessels – sensible for any single carrier. But every freed vessel lands back into a market already staring at a 37% orderbook. Analysts now expect 70–80% route normalisation this year and a full return next. The same decision that protects one line’s share erodes everyone’s freight rates. That is the quiet cost buried inside the homecoming.

Figure 1 – Carriers have kept their network reach but slashed frequency: a structurally leaner model that concentrates risk on fewer calls.

“The same decision that protects one line’s share erodes everyone’s freight rates.”

The network is getting leaner, and more brittle

Sea-Intelligence data shows carriers have preserved their geographic reach – around 10,000 distinct port-pairs – whilst cutting monthly port calls from an 2018 peak of nearly 82,000 to the high-50,000s. A leaner network looks efficient on a spreadsheet. It also concentrates the whole system on fewer nodes, so a single disruption – a typhoon like Bavi shutting Taiwanese and Chinese terminals, congestion at a transhipment hub – propagates further and faster.

The scramble off the water

The same contest is playing out in logistics M&A. MSC and CMA CGM are circling each other’s forwarding assets – Clasquin against Ceva – with talent moving between them and speculation swirling over disposals and stakes. Even the specialists are riding the wave: one Chinese specialised carrier expects first-half profit up 55–70% on a tight vessel market. Scale is being bought faster than it can be integrated.

The strongest case against me

You could argue a return to Suez is unambiguously good: lower emissions, restored schedules, cheaper voyages, and disciplined carriers who have learned to manage capacity through blank sailings. The efficiency is real. But efficiency that pours idle tonnage into a glut is not a gift to the market – it is the mechanism of the next downturn.

“Efficiency that pours idle tonnage into a glut is the mechanism of the next downturn.”

What I would watch

Three markers. The share of capacity back on Suez routing versus the spot-rate reaction – the glut trigger. Node concentration and schedule reliability, the real test of the leaner network. And the MSC–CMA CGM logistics contest, which shows where the majors think the margin now lives.