Global container trade is having a better year than almost anyone predicted in early 2026, but that resilience is generating a side effect the industry has struggled with for decades, a flood of empty boxes clogging ports, terminals, and inland yards.
According to Rico Luman, senior economist at Dutch bank ING, “container volumes turned out more resilient than expected this year, despite all headwinds”, but “it comes with much more empties”. Luman points to Chinese exports as the primary driver, noting that the trade disbalance between East and West “grows even larger, leading to much more empty containers on the backhaul,” for which shipping lines earn no revenue. The growth is concentrated in electrification-linked cargo (ie. data-center equipment, electric vehicle components, and related manufactured goods flowing out of China) which has no equivalent volume of return cargo coming back from importing regions.
A.P. Moller – Maersk, confirmed the same pattern on its August 13 Q2 2026 earnings call. CEO Vincent Clerc said that while global container market volume growth is running at roughly 4% for the year based on loaded cargo, the actual terminal handling burden is closer to 7–8%, because weak backhaul demand forces lines to reposition “an ever-increasing number of empty containers” just to keep equipment where it’s needed.
A loaded container generates freight revenue in both directions when trade is balanced. When it isn’t, carriers must still move the box back to where cargo is available, but that leg carries no cargo and no revenue.
Europe’s largest container gateway illustrates the pattern concretely.
Luman noted that the Port of Rotterdam saw empty container volumes surge 60% in the first six months of 2026 compared with the same period in 2020.
The port handled about the same number of boxes, but a much larger share of them contained nothing at all.
Shipping lines have responded by pushing the cost of empty repositioning directly onto shippers through detention, demurrage, and dedicated repositioning surcharges. Hapag-Lloyd AG effective 2026 tariff schedule for the US, for example, includes an “Empty Container Redelivery Charge” that applies whenever a box is returned to a location other than where it was picked up. These charges are a direct pass-through of the repositioning economics Clerc described: someone has to pay for the empty leg, and increasingly that someone is the shipper, not just the carrier absorbing it as a cost of doing business.
The empty-container squeeze isn’t a temporary side effect of a strong 2026 but a persistent feature of trade patterns that terminals, ports, and carriers will need to keep pricing and engineering around, through congestion surcharges, repositioning fees, and, eventually, further capital investment in landside handling capacity.
📸 and reference FreightWaves