News / Early peak season creates Q4 mini-peak – 'it's a new baseline'

Hong Kong. Photo: Mariusz Bugno | Dreamstime.com

With the Shanghai Containerised Freight Index having now witnessed three consecutive weeks of spot rate declines, it would appear that the apex of this year’s peak season has passed – but it has paved the way for another peak in Q4.

2026 is the third consecutive year in which the peak season has taken place far earlier than is historically the case – prior to the pandemic, shipping volumes, and spot rates, would ramp up in July, and continue through August and September until sometime around early October, when it became impossible to ship goods out of Asia to arrive and be distributed across Europe in time for the Christmas shopping season.

However, in the past three years, the peak season has effectively closed by end-July, at the latest.

And fresh evidence emerged today that this year’s peak has passed: this week saw at least one extra loader on the transpacific cancelled due to declining spot rates, while on the Asia-Europe trades, spot rates continue to fall despite relatively tight capacity.

“2024 broke the pattern entirely; the SCFI peaked on 5 July. 2025 pulled forward again, peaking 6 June, four weeks earlier than 2024,” Braemar’s container analyst, Jonathan Roach, wrote last week.

“This year lands almost exactly where 2024 did, 3 July, just two days later, before rolling over into the same summer decline.

Source: Braemar/Freightos Baltic Index

“Three different years, three different sets of conditions, the same shape. That’s no longer a coincidence. It’s a new baseline,” he added.

However, as he also noted: “The shape has repeated for three years, but the trigger has been different each time”, with the timing of the 2024 peak pulled forward by the Red Sea crisis. In 2025, it was Trump’s tariffs, and this year it has been the closure of Hormuz and the huge new bunker adjustment factor increases that came into effect on 1 July, with shippers under long-term contracts seeing an 80% jump in their fuel contributions.

In each case, the only way shippers could mitigate the supply chain disruption of price hikes and delays has been to load their cargo earlier, indicating that the psychological effects of the disruption seen during the pandemic remain.

“We told all our shipper clients to switch back to pandemic-mode,” one UK-based forwarder told The Loadstar in early 2024, shortly after the first Houthi attacks on shipping, and container vessels began rerouting via the Cap of Good Hope in numbers.

In effect, shippers have simply become accustomed to container supply chains now between six weeks and two months longer than they were in 2023.

However, a further caveat is that the earlier peak seasons of the past three years have been followed by a second, mini-peak, in the fourth quarter, bookended by Golden Week in early October and Chinese New Year.

“The mechanism differs each time, but the calendar doesn’t,” explained Mr Roach. “If 2026 holds the pattern, expect the current summer slide to find its floor sometime in September, followed by the usual Q4 pickup, timed, as ever, around Golden Week restocking and pre-lunar new year positioning.

“The early peak hasn’t broken the cycle. It’s just moved the whole thing forward by a season,” he added.

And there are still a couple of events that could trigger new shocks to the system: El Nino, and its impact on the Panama Canal, and the lingering typhoons in Asia that continue to hit port operations there.

During the worst period of the last El Nino, when drought halved the Panama Canal’s transit capacity, containerships heading from Asia to the US east coast were still able to transit Suez. Should this year’s El Nino see a repeat of that effect, Asia-USEC vessels will be forced to sail via the Cape of Good Hope, and that capacity effect could easily spread to other trades.