Red Sea return to unmask container shipping’s two-tier capacity crisis
- Red Sea reopening exposes a split fleet: megaship oversupply vs shrinking small vessel capacity
- Newbuilds are almost entirely large ships, locking in long‑term excess on mainlines
- Small ships are ageing out, threatening regional connectivity
The Red Sea’s reopening will trigger more than a routing reset. It will expose a structural mismatch in the container fleet with too many large ships and too few small ones, prompting a period that will be defined by uneven capacity and widening regional disparities