Record levels of global port congestion are exposing a wider problem in maritime: an industry that talks about collaboration and resilience still too often reacts only after vessels are already waiting. More than 4.3 million TEU of containership capacity is currently waiting to berth globally, according to Linerlytica data. The amount of capacity caught in port queues has now passed the roughly 4.0 million TEU peak recorded during the 2022 disruption. However, today’s larger global fleet means the current figure represents a smaller share of total capacity.
Much of the latest increase has been linked to disruption across East Asia, where storms have affected vessel schedules. But PortXchange says the scale of the congestion should not be treated simply as another weather event.
“Blaming ports is easy, but it does not solve the problem,” said Sjoerd de Jager, Managing Director & Co-Founder of PortXchange.
“A port call depends on shipping lines, terminals, pilots, agents and service providers making decisions that affect one another. If those parties are working from different information, or receiving it too late, disruption becomes much harder to manage.
“We know storms will happen. We know geopolitical events will disrupt schedules and we know infrastructure will come under pressure. The question is why we still wait until ships are queuing before we start coordinating properly.”
Drewry has also highlighted the growing pressure on ports, reporting increasing waiting times and declining container ship schedule reliability, while questioning where responsibility for congestion should sit.
PortXchange argues that looking for a single party to blame misses the point. Ports cannot control extreme weather or geopolitical conflict. Shipping lines cannot create berth capacity where none exists, and terminals cannot resolve disruption across an entire shipping network on their own. But shared responsibility does not mean there is nothing the industry can do.
De Jager continued: “We cannot have it both ways. We cannot keep asking ports and shipping networks to move more cargo, recover faster from disruptions, and reduce emissions while continuing to make decisions based on fragmented information.
“There is little sense in a vessel sailing faster towards a port if it is going to wait for hours or days when it arrives. If information about a delay reaches the vessel early enough, there is an opportunity to adjust speed and arrival time before fuel, time and money have already been wasted.”
Research by the UCL Energy Institute and UMAS has previously shown that better-managed port arrivals, accounting for congestion and waiting times, could reduce voyage emissions by around 10% on average for containerships, with greater savings possible for other vessel types.
PortXchange says that reducing the avoidable effects of congestion depends on better visibility and earlier coordination between the parties involved in a port call. Its EmissionInsider platform helps ports understand emissions across ship, truck, rail, and terminal activities, allowing them to identify where emissions are generated and where operational changes could have an impact. PortXchange’s Synchronizer supports coordination between shipping lines, agents, terminals and service providers, enabling them to work from shared planned, expected and actual timings for a port call. The company is also developing Custom Digital Solutions around specific operational challenges faced by individual ports and maritime operators. These can include applications using AI and machine learning, but PortXchange says the starting point must be the problem that needs solving rather than the technology itself.
“Ports are not identical,” said de Jager.
“They have different infrastructure, systems, working practices and available data. Technology needs to fit the operation, not force every operation to fit the same technology.
“Digital tools will not create another berth, stop a storm or resolve geopolitical instability. But they can give people better information earlier and reduce the number of decisions being made too late.
“That is what frustrates me about the current situation. Many of the problems we keep discussing are not happening because maritime has no possible response. We already have much of the data. We have the technology. We know which parties need to cooperate. “What we have not always been good at is turning those things into different decisions.”
PortXchange says the latest congestion figures should be treated as more than another short-term disruption.
De Jager concluded: “Global trade will continue to put pressure on ports and shipping networks. Weather will continue to disrupt schedules and political events will continue to affect routes. We cannot control all of that.
“But we can control whether we face it with better information and earlier decisions, or wait until another queue has formed before asking what went wrong.
“Maritime has spent years talking about collaboration, resilience and decarbonisation. Record congestion is another reminder that eventually our actions have to catch up with our words.”
