Terminal Utilisation: The Choice For Never Ending Port Congestion
Hapag-Lloyd signed an agreement on 19 August to acquire 25% of APM Terminals Maasvlakte II in Rotterdam. Six days later Linerlytica counted a record 4.3m TEU of containership capacity waiting to berth worldwide. Both events rest on the same economics. Terminal utilisation across the industry is set at a level that cannot absorb a shock. The economics of a fixed-cost asset punish anyone holding spare capacity. Disruption meanwhile stopped being an event and became the norm.
Drewry published the number on 27 August. A terminal running at 90% berth utilisation takes roughly a week to recover from a one-day disruption. A terminal at 75% recovers in two days. The gap between those two operating points, Drewry says, can in a normal year be the difference between a competitive and an uncompetitive return on capital.
Why terminal utilisation sits where it does
A terminal is quay, cranes, yard and automation, bought once and paid for over decades. Almost every cost is fixed. Revenue arrives with the box. So throughput is the only lever an operator holds. The terminal running at 75% has bought the same asset as the one at 90%, and charges for fewer boxes.
The spending record shows the choice being made. Across nine major container ports, Drewry finds terminal operators expanded capacity by 21% between 2019 and 2026 while volumes grew 28%. Rotterdam held capacity static and closed a smaller container terminal in 2020, when volumes fell and the larger terminals took the traffic. Drewry calls that normal private-sector investment behaviour. No rule was broken and no plan failed.
Capital is not the missing piece either. Investment across the operators Drewry samples rose 23% in 2025. It expects them to add 186m TEU of portfolio capacity between 2025 and 2030, though joint ownership double-counts some of that. Money is going in, but not into slack. It goes into throughput, because throughput has a revenue line and resilience does not. Terminal utilisation returns to where the economics put it.
So the explanation the industry reaches for does not hold. Maersk chief executive Vincent Clerc told a results presentation on 13 August that port congestion follows fifteen years of lagging investment in terminal capacity. Drewry sees no global trend towards underinvestment, but a stronger focus on asset utilisation.
How the weather changed
Global average ship waiting times have nearly doubled between the first seven months of 2019 and the same period this year. Average time in port per container ship call is up 31% over the same comparison. A growing share of that time is spent waiting for a berth rather than being worked alongside. So ships are demonstrably less productive in port than before the pandemic.
Shocks arrive from unrelated directions and land on that. Typhoons disrupted Chinese ports through August, and in one early-August week ships waited an average of 3.6 days for a berth. The Panama Canal cuts Neopanamax transits to nine slots a day from 3 September, because rainfall across the watershed stays below forecast. The Gulf has been disrupted since March. Alphaliner has Jebel Ali falling from tenth to thirty-second in the global port rankings. First-half throughput came in at 3.14m TEU against 7.77m a year earlier.
A system that needs a week to recover from one bad day is absorbing bad days continuously. None of that is a terminal utilisation problem the operators can solve alone.
Disruption is paying somebody
Drewry makes a point the port congestion coverage mostly skips. Carriers optimise for cost and return exactly as terminal operators do, and the tools they use to protect returns make the queue worse. Blank sailings, ad hoc sailings and extra loaders concentrate arrivals, and the resulting peaks are a major contributor to yard congestion and waiting time.
Those same delays are holding freight rates up, and Maersk says so itself. Its second-quarter release of 13 August names rising port congestion among the drivers of the quarter’s spot rate increase. Full-year EBITDA guidance went to USD 10.5 to 12.5bn, from USD 4.5 to 7.0bn in May. Ocean EBIT reached USD 935m, from USD 229m a year earlier. In Terminals, revenue per move rose 7.1%, helped by storage revenue. Congestion pays that side too.
The incentives therefore split three ways. The terminal operator cannot afford to drop terminal utilisation, which is the only move that shortens the queue. Carriers are earning more while the queue exists, and on Drewry’s reading their scheduling choices help produce it. Shippers pay the elevated rate and receive a vessel five and a half days late, against three to four days before the pandemic. Schedule reliability is stuck at 60% to 65%. Nobody in the chain is paid to hold slack, and one party is paid for its absence.
Who pays for buffer
Drewry’s own conclusion is that terminal operators cannot finance buffer capacity on their own. Rotterdam proves it in the same terminal. The quay walls for the 1,000 metres of berth going in at Maasvlakte II are the Port of Rotterdam Authority‘s, not the operator’s. That Authority is publicly owned, and its stated core tasks include supporting the future-resilience of the port.
The UAE shows the other version of the same thing. Its answer to Hormuz was not more quay at Jebel Ali. DP World has moved 500,000 TEU through GCC road and rail corridors since March. In July it signed a 50-year deal for two terminals on the east coast, letting ships reach a UAE gateway without entering the strait. Redundancy gets built by whoever has a strategic reason rather than a return-on-capital reason, and in neither case by the party that sets terminal utilisation.
Where the terminal deals fit
Carriers take the other route. They buy access to the quay rather than pay to build it. Drewry’s nineteen global terminal operators handled 49.9% of world port volumes in 2025 on an equity-adjusted basis, up from 48.8%. The operators it classes as hybrid, wholly or majority owned by carriers, are the ones pushing hardest into new build. MSC Group, CMA CGM, Adani and Hanseatic Global Terminals are each projected to add 4m TEU or more of greenfield capacity by 2030. The first two add over 8m TEU each. Drewry attributes that to matched ownership: a carrier-owned terminal can guarantee its own volumes.
Hapag-Lloyd’s announcement is careful. The stake secures long-term automated terminal handling capacity under Hanseatic Global Terminals. APM Terminals keeps operational control. Completion still depends on regulatory approval. Nothing promises priority berthing, and nothing needs to. Where berths are allocated rather than sold, securing capacity for yourself is the whole of the benefit.
What equity cannot do is change terminal utilisation. Maasvlakte II is adding 1,000 metres of deep-sea berth, taking the total to 2,000 metres, with design capacity moving towards 5.4m TEU a year. That capacity is real. It also arrives into the same economics that held capacity growth to 21% while volumes grew 28%.
Building it costs capacity now. APM Terminals told customers in June that the reconfiguration cuts available rail capacity at Maasvlakte II by about 40%. That runs until the end of June 2027. For a year, rail moves only in pre-agreed slots, and the terminal decides who gets them.
What a shipper should do about it
So treat the queue as a fixed cost rather than a disruption. The capacity arriving by 2030 is real, and it will run at the terminal utilisation that pays.
You are the last party with a reason to hold slack, so hold it. That means inventory, or a second routing, priced into landed cost rather than found in a quarterly variance. At the reliability levels above, buffer is not caution but the price of the queue.
Then ask in the next tender which terminals in the string your carrier holds equity in, and what the stake entitles it to. That answer is not in the rate sheet. A carrier’s terminal map has become part of its service quality, so treat it as diligence.
So put one question to the next proposal on your desk. Not whether it improves reliability, but which cost it moves, demurrage or safety stock, and by how much.
MVAventures models supply chain networks for manufacturers, wholesalers and logistics operators. We test routings and inventory positions against the delays a network actually meets rather than the transit times it is sold on. Before your next ocean tender, contact us.
