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The intra-Asia trade has emerged from 2025 not only as questionably the largest trade, but also the most profitable, after Wan Hai emerged as the top earner amongst the largest carriers that publish financial results.
With the last set of fourth-quarter and full-year 2025 results published by Cosco earlier this week, Taiwanese carrier Wan Hai topped the list.
“For the third consecutive quarter, Taiwan’s Wan Hai Lines posted the highest individual operating margin, generating a return of 18.9%, significantly ahead of the next candidate, HMM with 10.7%.
“Wan Hai also topped the rankings for the year. Benefitting from its historical focus on the intra-Asia region, which enjoyed a major boost in 2025 due to US tariff policies, the Taipei-based line is also profiting from efficiencies from its young fleet, which now has an average age of nine years.
“Overall, Wan Hai’s annual revenue fell 13% but operating profits by only 34%, the lowest year-on-year decline among the major carriers.
“The company also credited pricing discipline and routing optimization,” it said.
Meanwhile, Hong Kong-listed intra-Asia carrier SITC this week confirmed its earlier guidance from January that 2025 would be a bumper year with a 20% increase in operating profit.
The intra-Asia trade finished 2025 at just shy of 50m teu, and with recent trading trends suggesting that volumes strength is only likely to intensify, deepsea carriers hungry for growth are expected to target the region for acquisition opportunities, maritime analyst Lars Jensen told delegates at this year’s S&P Global TPM conference in Long Beach.
“We should brace ourselves for a significant merger and acquisition wave across the intra-Asian carriers,” he said.
“Not so much the big carriers – the main play here is the intra-Asia market because there is a massive amount of smaller regional carriers and they’re likely going to be acquired by larger carriers,” he added.
Alphaliner this week also noted that Cosco’s results were buoyed by its intra-Asia earnings, which offset deep sea trades weakness.
“Shanghai-based Cosco Group reported an annual net profit of $4.3bn on shipping activities after receiving a major boost from domestic and intra-Asia activities.
“While revenues fell on nearly all routes, Cosco saw a 12% rise in earnings on its Mainland China activities. By contrast, revenues on the transpacific and Asia-Europe both fell 17%,” it added.
While Maersk, ONE and Yang Ming all reported fourth-quarter EBIT losses – the first quarterly red ink seen in the liner sector since the end of 2023 – every major carrier reported a full-year profit and Alphaliner said the sector remains in “a financial supercycle”.
Source: Alphaliner
Source: Alphaliner
The top nine carriers generated operating profits of $13.9bn for 2025, down from $32.6bn in 2024, [but] well above the decade-average prior to Covid however, showing that container shipping remains in a very profitable supercycle.
“While financial results for the liner industry were previously expected to fall progressively in 2026 with the continued deliveries of new container vessels and the possible reopening of the Red Sea, the advent of the war in Iran could provide another black swan geopolitical event which defers this decline,” it added.
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