Actually, there are more container ships worldwide all the time. Nevertheless, capacity is lacking in daily operations. At first, this sounds somewhat odd, but it is easy to explain.
Sea-Intelligence calculates that approximately 5% of global deep-sea container ship capacity is currently tied up due to delays. This corresponds to roughly 1.7 million TEU.
The ships have not disappeared and are not empty. They are simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.
A ship waits in front of a port, stays longer at the terminal, or arrives five days late in Rotterdam, Hamburg, or Asia. As a result, the next voyage also starts later. And then the one after that. A small delay quickly becomes a delay that extends across the entire schedule.
Of course, such delays were normal in the past. Between 2011 and 2019, approximately 2.2% of capacity was tied up on average. Today it is around 5%. The actual additional loss compared to earlier is thus approximately 1 million TEU.
For comparison: The total 1.7 million TEU would correspond to a shipping company fleet that would be even larger than Evergreen.
Hamburg clearly demonstrates how this can occur. Evergreen ships were sometimes berthed there in July for 137 to 187 hours. That is between 5.7 and 7.8 days. Other shipping companies sometimes got away much faster.
One reason is also the ever-larger ships. When a megamax ship brings not 2,000 or 3,000 but suddenly 7,000 or even more containers for a port, the terminal, cranes, rail, barge, and truck services must also be able to handle this volume. This is likely where the bottleneck increasingly lies.
For the market, this means: New ships alone do not solve the capacity problem. If ports and hinterland cannot keep up, the additional capacity simply remains idle longer.