News / Capacity cuts and trade war combine to increase container tonnage laying idle

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A perfect storm of radical capacity cuts by carriers and US president Donald Trump’s threat to hike tariffs on Chinese goods could see many more containerships laid-up, according to Alphaliner.

Yesterday, The Loadstar reported shipping association BIMCO’s warning that over a quarter of container trade on the transpacific could be at risk from the escalating US-China tit-for-tat trade war.

The latest data from Alphaliner, based on a survey on 3 September, records 143 idled ships, for 408,283 teu representing 1.8% of the total global cellular ...