Box shipping and air freight – whither earnings when disruption passes?
The Loadstar · Sep 23, 2026
The earnings driving this year’s rally in container shipping and air cargo have more to do with capacity trapped in the wrong place than with how much the world is buying and shipping. Disruption, not volume growth, has become the main earnings driver. The open question is how long that lasts once the specific shocks behind it begin to fade. Container shipping’s disruption began in earnest in December 2023, when Houthi ...
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What this moves
Real friction: delays, added cost, or partial capacity loss.
The strait sits within the Joint War Committee's listed areas, so transits are priced per voyage rather than absorbed into normal operating cost.
Check it yourself: Listed Areas (Hull War, Piracy, Terrorism and Related Perils) (Joint War Committee, Lloyd's Market Association)
Avoiding this strait means giving up Suez, which puts the voyage around the Cape of Good Hope and adds ten days or more each way.
Check it yourself: Port & chokepoint transit tracking (IMF PortWatch)
Diversion here is the same commercial event as a Suez diversion: capacity absorbed by distance tightens the Asia–Europe trade.
Check it yourself: World Container Index (Drewry) · Freightos Baltic Index (FBX) (Freightos / Baltic Exchange) · Ocean freight rate data (Xeneta)
Every diverted service ties up its ships for longer, reducing usable capacity across the network without a single vessel leaving the fleet.
Check it yourself: Review of Maritime Transport (fleet & trade capacity series) (UNCTAD)
The corridor
Bab el-Mandeb Strait
Global chokepointRed Sea / Gulf of AdenThe southern gate to the Red Sea, between Yemen and Djibouti. Suez is only useful to a ship that can get through here first, which is why the two are effectively a single routing decision.
- Bab el-Mandeb and Suez are one decision, not two: a carrier avoiding this strait has already given up the canal, so disruption here shows up in Suez transit counts.
- It sits inside the Joint War Committee's listed areas, so hull war-risk premiums and crew-hazard terms are priced per transit rather than absorbed in normal operating cost.
- Vessel-tracking and canal-transit counts move within days of an incident, well before any freight index prints — this is the leading indicator for Asia–Europe cost.
- Cape of Good Hope, with the same ten-days-each-way penalty as a Suez diversion.
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