Chinese shippers 'fogged down' by worsening port congestion
Foggy weather at China’s key container ports of Shanghai and Ningbo has worsened the congestion, ...
Shanghai and Singapore continue to hold the top two spots in the world’s largest container ports, as well as boasting the most liner shipping connections – but shippers may experience reliability issues.
Shanghai retained its crown as the world’s largest container port after Shanghai International Port Group (SIPG) yesterday posted 2025 throughput at 55.06m teu, a 6.9% increase on 2024’s 51.6m teu.
SIPG, the port’s sole operator, explained that more transhipment had been part of the growth, and had led to its Yangshan deepwater area – some 32.5km offshore, on a dedicated island – handling the majority of Shanghai’s container traffic.
It said: “International transhipment reached 7.91m teu, up 10.6% year on year, further strengthening its reach and influence as a global hub.
“Notably, the Yangshan area recorded year-on-year throughput growth of 10.4%, accounting for 52.1% of the port’s total volume and setting a global benchmark for the operation of ultra-large deepwater port clusters.”
It added: “The annual throughput of Yangshan Phase III Terminal surpassed 10m teu for the first time, further reinforcing its role as the hub’s core pillar.”
The port certainly stretched its lead over second-placed Singapore, where yesterday terminal operator PSA released its preliminary figures for last year, reporting throughput of 44.5m teu, an 8% increase over 2024.
The operator added that its terminals outside Singapore had contributed an additional 60.4m teu, a 2% increase.
This would be notably below the expected circa-5% increase in global container volumes Container Trades Statistics expects for full-year 2025.
Along with Ningbo, Shanghai and Singapore unsurprisingly had the highest scores in the UNCTAD’s port liner connectivity index.
However, while routing cargo through the world’s largest ports gives shippers a greater number of network connections, the increased choice may come at the expense of schedule reliability, according to new analysis from Sea-Intelligence.
This week it unveiled what it termed a “complexity ceiling” – a situation where there are so many shipping connections that delays inevitably occur, with none of the three busiest ports able to report on-time arrival of vessels better than 60%.
“The “mega-hubs” – such as Shanghai, Singapore and Ningbo – have hit a reliability wall, so to speak,” Sea-Intelligence CEO Alan Murphy said.
Source: Sea-Intelligence Consulting
“Despite their geographic differences, these massive hubs are clustered tightly in the mid-50% reliability range.
“This suggests that once network complexity exceeds a certain threshold, the sheer volume of connections creates a systemic drag on performance that makes it difficult to break through the 60% reliability barrier,” he explained.
However, The Loadstar understands that, at least in the case of Singapore where many of its terminals are run as joint-ventures with liner companies, there is one good statistical explanation for the reliability wall: it often happens that if one vessel in a weekly service is particularly late arriving, the carrier partner will often allow it wait out the call of the following vessel, thus considerably dragging down the overall average reliability of the service or terminal itself.
“When a carrier wants to put one vessel at anchor for a few days while the other vessels catch up and maintain the schedule, there’s not much we can do – but it does bring down the efficiency figures,” a source said.
Meanwhile, Mr Murphy suggested that, for Asian exporters using the largest hubs, the best option may be South Korea’s Busan.
“With a connectivity score of 1,648, Busan is firmly in the mega-hub category, yet it achieved an average reliability of 63% during the analysed period.
“While this is not an objectively high score, compared with smaller ports, it is significantly higher than its direct peers – roughly 10 percentage points higher.
“Busan effectively defines the ‘frontier’ for this group, offering the best available reliability for shippers’ maximum connectivity,” he added.
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