News / Secondary box trades take centre stage, with global volume growth set to wane

Photo: Cosco Shipping

Delegates at this week’s TOC Europe Container Supply Chain 2025 event in Rotterdam were told how China appears to have been looking to diversify its export markets long before President Trump announced so-called reciprocal tariffs.

Nigel Pusey, CEO of liner data provider Container Trade Statistics (CTS), argued that the exceptionally strong global lifting figures seen in March and April, and the inevitable focus on Mr Trump’s trade antics, were masking profound changes under way on a number of secondary trades.

The first four months of 2025 – CTS data is published on a two-month lag – saw global volumes grow 5% year on year, with March and April looking like some of the strongest months in container shipping history.

“5% growth in the first four months of this year is off the back of more than 6% last year, so we’re seeing something like 13.5% growth in two years – that’s the sort of growth we haven’t seen in container shipping for many a year.

“Some of that is people front-loading, etc… but things are changing. There are things happening out there which are actually stimulants for further growth.

“We saw, in March, the largest-ever lift, 16.3m teu in one month, and April saw 15.7m,” he said.

Despite the strong volumes so far this year, most analysts believe global trade will be more muted as we move into the second half.

Xeneta chief analyst Peter Sand told The Loadstar his full-year global forecast was for growth of “no more than 2%, and although I think we are in an early peak season, there should be no wishful thinking about China-US relations and that trade will ease in the second half”.

Meanwhile Drewry’s ports & terminals analyst, Eirik Hooper, recently revised a previous forecast of a 1% contraction, to around 1.9% growth.

Mr Pusey added that while the 2 April tariff announcement knocked off 250,000 teu in volumes from China to the US, which he described as “significant movement”, but not unforeseen.

“One of the things I’m suggesting is that the Chinese started to realise all this a year ago, when they saw Trump coming into power, and I think there was a conscious effort to start thinking about where cargo should start to move.”

This would explain, he argued, why volumes on Far East-India/Middle East, Far East-South & Central America, and Far-East-Sub Saharan Africa had all shown far higher rates of growth.

According to CTS data, these trades were all up between 15% and 17%, year-to-date, while post-2 April, that growth increased markedly.

“In April alone, it’s between 23% and 29% up – so we are seeing an attempt to shift cargo. And you can actually see that this shift has been going on pretty much since the middle of last year,” Mr Pusey added.

Year-to-date shipments from the Far East to the east coast of South America have increased 13% year on year, while to the west coast of South America, they were up 21%.

“We are seeing significant movements into Brazil, into Peru, into Chile,, of cargo coming out of China, and I think that shows the expansion to these trades is a strategy; it’s not just moving boxes from one place to another.

“It’s very much a reflection of how markets in this day and age can move quickly, and not just continue down the path they have done historically – and as other markets start to grow, the capacities of the shipping lines are moving to these areas,” he explained.

This has been underscored by service developments such as MSC’s recent decision to deploy a series of 24,000 teu ultra-large container vessels to the Asia-West Africa trade

“We’ve seen China pushing for volumes and thinking of new markets and not just relying on pumping the cargo into America – these increases are not substantial enough yet to make up for what they would lose by going to America, but they are making some significant income growths. And I think it’s going to be fascinating to watch how that continued growth underpins global growth for the rest of this year,” he said.