On September 18, Maersk confirmed it had ordered 26 new container ships. Each will carry 18,600 TEU, all of them run on LNG dual fuel engines, and deliveries are scheduled across 2029 and 2030. Maersk did not name the shipyards or disclose what it is paying. Together with eight ships of the same design it ordered from China’s New Times Shipbuilding in February, that is 34 vessels of one class, and the 26 confirmed in September alone add roughly 484,000 TEU of capacity.
The number itself is not the story. Carriers order ships constantly. What makes this order different is who placed it. For roughly a decade, Maersk has been the most conservative shipbuilder among the majors, adding capacity slower than its rivals while everyone else filled their order books. That restraint just ended, and the timing says more about the state of container shipping than the ships themselves do.
Why now, after ten years of holding back
MSC took the title of world’s largest container line from Maersk in January 2022, edging past it by fewer than 2,000 TEU at the time, and it has not looked back since. MSC now runs close to 7.4 million TEU of capacity against Maersk’s roughly 4.7 million, a gap that widened every year Maersk stayed cautious. CMA CGM has been expanding aggressively too, and analysts expect it to overtake Maersk in fleet size in 2027 regardless of this order, since none of the new ships arrive before 2029. Maersk’s chief executive Vincent Clerc said in August that the company was approaching the limits of what its existing fleet could deliver. Staying disciplined while one rival pulls ahead is a different decision than staying disciplined while two of them do.
The order book everyone else already filled
Issue three covered the headline number: the global container ship order book has passed 10 million TEU, close to a third of the entire active fleet, the highest ratio since the 2004 to 2009 building cycle that took a full decade to clear. What that issue did not get into is how unevenly that order book is spread. According to Vespucci Maritime’s Lars Jensen, this order lifts Maersk’s order book to about 35 percent of its fleet. That brings it close to CMA CGM and MSC, both at 39 percent, but still well short of COSCO at 52 percent. Across the top four carriers combined, ships on order now equal 41 percent of their fleets, against 29 percent for the next six lines in the top ten. Fleet growth is concentrating among the biggest players. It was not that Maersk saw something the others missed. It was the last of the majors still holding out, and it just stopped.
What Maersk actually ordered, and what it did not
For weeks before the announcement, the market had reported Maersk lining up around 40 ships, including vessels of 24,000 TEU or more, the largest class now sailing. The confirmed order settled that: there are no 24,000 TEU ships in it. At 18,600 TEU, these vessels are big but deliberately not the biggest, which gives Maersk more flexibility to deploy them across different trades rather than tying them to the largest Asia to Europe strings. The fuel choice says something too. Maersk’s previous newbuilds were designed for methanol. These run on LNG, a shift that reflects how little alternative fuel is actually available at scale.
All twenty six vessels run on dual fuel, and decarbonization rules are pushing carriers toward slower sailing speeds to cut emissions. A slower ship covers the same route in more days. To keep a weekly service running on the same schedule, a carrier needs more hulls in rotation, not fewer, even if total cargo demand stays flat. Some of this order book is not really about growth. It is about running the same network slower and needing extra ships just to stand still. That distinction rarely makes it into the overcapacity headlines, but it matters for how long the current glut actually lasts, since some of this new tonnage is replacing speed rather than adding net capacity.
The ships nobody is taking off the water
Here is the part that should worry anyone hoping this order book corrects itself on its own. Only 0.3 percent of the global container fleet currently sits idle. Nineteen new vessels landed in a recent thirty day window alone, adding 184,000 TEU of capacity. In that same window, three vessels totalling 3,000 TEU left service. Another million TEU is due before the year is out. Carriers are not scrapping their way through this cycle. They are adding to it, faster than anything is coming off, and the newest order in the group just came from the one carrier that had been sitting it out.
A second supply shock that has nothing to do with shipyards
Last week’s issue covered the return to Suez. Xeneta estimates that a large scale return could release the equivalent of 6 to 8 percent of the global fleet, which would be ships that already exist, arriving in the market within weeks rather than years. Put that on top of an order book worth about a third of the active fleet, and the case for rates firming up gets weaker from both ends at once. The capacity coming out of the shipyards is years away. The capacity coming back from the Cape of Good Hope is arriving now.
What this means if you are booking capacity
None of this points toward rates firming up soon. Every major carrier now has meaningful new capacity in the pipeline, including the one that used to be the exception, and almost nobody is retiring older tonnage to offset it. That combination keeps the leverage with shippers for longer than the headline overcapacity numbers alone would suggest, because it signals the carriers themselves are not betting on a near term correction either. For anyone negotiating a service contract over the next few quarters, a carrier sitting on this much committed future capacity has less room to hold a hard line on price than the headline rate suggests, and a shipper who knows the order book numbers walks into that conversation with a stronger hand than one working off last year’s invoice.
What I am watching from here
Which yards Maersk used and what it paid, once those details come out, since price per slot tells you how confident the carrier is about rates in 2029. Whether MSC or CMA CGM answer with new orders of their own now that the last holdout has moved. And whether any carrier blinks first on idling older ships once the next wave of newbuilds starts landing in 2027 and 2028.
That is issue six. If this was useful, forward it to someone still waiting for freight rates to turn around on their own.
Dhiraj
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