Charting the Course: HOW TO NAVIGATE MARITIME SHIPPING
GEOPOLITICAL TENSION CREATES CHALLENGES Each year, ships move about 280 million containers across the world’s oceans, transporting roughly 80% of international trade when measured by volume, according to the World Shipping Council. The most immediate disrupter to these journeys is geopolitical route instability, says Michael Augustin, principal director and ocean freight lead with Accenture. This instability impacts lead times, inventory buffers, supplier allocation, and network design. Both carriers and shippers now plan around the increasingly frequent geopolitical disruptions, rather than wait them out. In the Red Sea, the Houthis have seized several islands, boosting their ability to control this important shipping route. Transit through the Suez Canal, which connects the Mediterranean and Red Seas, remains about 70% below 2023 levels. The threat of confrontation in the Strait of Hormuz has prompted a 95% drop in traffic. Many ships now are diverting around the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa.
The Panama Canal has become another pressure point, says Ian Wilson, principal analyst with Everstream Analytics. In late summer 2026, the Panama Canal Authority announced restrictions to the number of vessels that can move through the canal, citing a lack of rainfall and lower watershed inflows, as well as the forecast of a severe El Niño event. Together, these challenges have depressed global shipping schedule reliability to around 56%, says Melissa Curry, vice president of global at NFI. They also lead to congested ports and localized shortages of specialized equipment, such as refrigerated trailers. Because of the disruptions, carriers often need to balance excess capacity in some parts of their networks, with strained capacity elsewhere, says Priya Anand, director of global logistics services with Jabil, a provider of engineering, supply chain, and manufacturing solutions. At times, carriers have canceled scheduled voyages, which can artificially boost demand. Spot rates are also up, often dramatically. The Shanghai-Los Angeles
spot rate jumped 185% between September 2025 and September 2026, according to Wayfindr, a logistics provider. Similarly, the spot rate for the Shanghai-New York route was up 161% over the same period, Wayfindr says. Carrier disruptions are particularly difficult because they rarely affect only the ocean legs of shipper supply chains, says Michael Britton, head of North America market, ocean products, with Maersk. When vessels are rerouted or schedules change, the effects often ripple through transportation, warehousing, inventory planning, and other operations. For instance, shippers may boost inventory levels to ensure they have enough to cover the extended lead times. TARIFFS HAVE AN IMPACT At the same time, ongoing shifts in tariff policy make costs and demand patterns hard to predict, Augustin says. Shippers often accelerate purchases ahead of anticipated tariff deadlines, creating artificial spikes in volume that are then followed by aggressive pullbacks. These swings impact carriers’ revenue and complicate their network planning. They also upend shippers’ ability to plan. As manufacturers have diversified at least some operations from China to other parts of the world, they’ve also generated new logistics requirements around ports, customs capabilities, lead times and other functions. “Sourcing footprints are changing faster than transportation networks and infrastructure can adapt,” Augustin says. This often sparks capacity mismatches. Another challenge is the “compounding event phenomenon,” Wilson says. When multiple disruptions hit at about the same time, the impact of each is magnified. For instance, Typhoon Saudel hit areas of China a few weeks after Typhoon Dolphin. Some port operators hadn’t cleared congestion from Dolphin before Saudel hit, making the jobs even more difficult. Expanding regulations are also driving up shipping costs. For example,
Hapag-Lloyd is equipping its entire standard container fleet with real-time IoT sensors— giving shippers end-to-end visibility into cargo location, door openings, and environmental conditions across global transit routes.
32 Inbound Logistics • October 2026
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