运力过剩观察：为什么航空公司在中美航线上仍然亏损
Container shipping headlines on the transpacific lane in 2026 read almost like a contradiction. In one month, spot rates from the Far East to the US West Coast spike toward $6,000 per forty-foot container; a few weeks later, forwarders are quoting numbers barely above $2,100 on the very same route. Underneath that whiplash sits a much steadier story: the China-US trade has been chronically oversupplied with vessel capacity since 2023, and even in weeks when freight rates look healthy on the surface, the carriers running those ships are frequently losing money once fuel, port fees, charter costs, and idle tonnage are factored into the equation.
For importers, freight forwarders, and e-commerce sellers who depend on the China-US corridor, understanding why this is happening matters more than watching any single week’s rate print. This article walks through the mechanics of transpacific overcapacity, the financial data behind carrier losses, the reasons rates keep whipsawing, and what shippers can practically do to protect their supply chains while the industry works through a multi-year rebalancing.
A Trade Lane Built for Boom, Now Living Through a Hangover
The roots of today’s overcapacity trace back to 2020 through 2023, when pandemic-era freight rates reached historic highs and carriers used the windfall to order aggressively. Shipyards in South Korea and China filled up with orders for ultra-large containerships, many of them destined for exactly the Asia-North America lanes that had generated the richest margins. Those vessels are now being delivered in large numbers, arriving into a market where consumer demand growth has cooled and where tariff policy has made shippers far less predictable in how and when they book cargo.
The mismatch is structural rather than seasonal. Industry analysts tracking the global orderbook estimate that the container fleet is expanding by roughly 3.6 percent this year, while underlying demand growth is closer to 3 percent. That gap sounds small until it compounds across an entire year of sailings, and forecasters at Sea-Intelligence have pointed out that the current overcapacity cycle is not expected to peak until 2027, meaning the pressure on rates and margins is likely to persist well beyond this year unless carriers remove capacity more aggressively than they have so far.
Tariff policy has layered a second, more erratic pressure on top of this structural overcapacity. Every round of tariff announcements, exemptions, or truces triggers a rush of frontloading as importers try to beat a deadline, followed by a demand air-pocket once the rush passes. Carriers end up chasing a moving target: they add capacity and raise rates to capture a frontloading surge, only to be caught with too many empty slots once the rush fades and blank sailings become the only lever left to defend pricing.
This combination of a structural glut and a policy-driven demand cycle is unusual even by the standards of an industry that has always been prone to boom-and-bust swings. In previous downturns, carriers could generally count on demand recovering along a predictable seasonal curve once inventories normalized. This time, the timing of demand recovery is tied less to retail restocking cycles and more to political announcements out of Washington and Beijing, which are far harder for a shipping line’s network planners to forecast months in advance when vessels and slots need to be allocated.
The Numbers Behind the Red Ink
Financial disclosures from the major carriers illustrate how quickly the mood has shifted from record profitability to genuine strain. Maersk’s ocean segment reported a negative operating result in the fourth quarter of last year, and analysts at Drewry Maritime Financial Research revised their full-year earnings forecast for the top container lines down sharply from roughly $75 billion projected at the start of last year to closer to $32 billion by year end, with further declines expected as new vessel deliveries continued to hit the water.
Ocean Network Express’s results tell a similar story on the operational side. The carrier moved noticeably less cargo eastbound from Asia to North America year over year, even while holding vessel utilization near 90 percent, an indication that carriers are keeping ships full mainly by cutting rates rather than by genuine demand strength. The table below summarizes some of the data points that have defined the current downturn.
| 指示符 | Recent Reading | 它预示着什么 |
| Full-year carrier EBIT forecast | Revised from ~$75bn to ~$32bn | Industry-wide profit collapse despite steady cargo volumes |
| Maersk Ocean segment EBIT (Q4) | Negative operating result | A top-three carrier posting an outright loss on ocean operations |
| Global fleet growth vs. demand growth | ~3.6% vs. ~3% | Structural oversupply widening rather than closing |
| ONE eastbound Asia-US volume | Down versus prior year at ~90% utilization | Ships stay full only because rates are cut, not because demand grew |
| Cyclical overcapacity peak (forecast) | 2027 | Rebalancing is a multi-year process, not a single bad quarter |
None of these figures suggest an industry in freefall the way 2009 or the early pandemic months were. Instead, they describe a slow bleed: carriers are still moving record or near-record volumes, but the price they can charge per box has been ground down by too many available slots chasing the same cargo, and the gap between healthy operating margins and today’s numbers keeps widening.
It is worth remembering how far the pendulum has swung. Container lines collectively earned more than 300 billion dollars in combined profit across 2020 through 2022, a windfall that funded the very newbuilding wave now weighing on the market. The current stretch of thin or negative margins is, in that sense, the other half of the same cycle: the industry borrowed against future demand growth when it ordered ships during the boom, and it is now paying that back in the form of oversupply during a period when demand growth has slowed.
Why China-US Rates Keep Whipsawing
Spot rates on the China-US corridor have moved in a genuinely unusual pattern this year, and that pattern is itself a symptom of overcapacity rather than a sign of a healthy, balanced market. A market with too much idle capacity is also a market where a modest demand pulse gets amplified into a sharp rate spike, because carriers have every incentive to push rates up the moment bookings tighten even slightly, before excess tonnage floods back in and pulls prices down again.
| 周期 | China/East Asia – USWC (per FEU) | China/East Asia – USEC (per FEU) |
| Early Feb 2026 | $2,124 | $2,946 |
| Late Oct 2025 (post-truce) | $2,147 (down 59% YoY) | $3,044 (down 48% YoY) |
| Q2 2026 peak (per market reports) | $ 6,000 + | $ 7,000 + |
| Early 2026 (Drewry WCI, blended) | 〜$ 2,100 | – |
The swings visible in this table were driven by a recognizable sequence of events. An October 2025 trade truce between Washington and Beijing lowered certain tariffs and paused proposed port fees, which briefly calmed the market but did not reverse the underlying oversupply, and rates continued drifting down into early 2026 on soft demand. A second wave of frontloading ahead of mid-year tariff deadlines then pushed rates sharply higher through the second quarter, with carriers layering on general rate increases and peak season surcharges as space tightened. By July, several market reports were already flagging signs that the surge could stabilize or soften again, underscoring just how quickly sentiment flips in a market carrying this much spare capacity.
For a shipper trying to plan a landed cost, this pattern is genuinely difficult to work with. A quote obtained two weeks before cargo is ready can be a thousand dollars off by the time a booking is confirmed, and a preferred sailing date can disappear entirely if a rate increase pulls a wave of competing bookings into the same week. Locking in space and price well ahead of a shipment’s ready date has become less of an optimization and more of a basic risk-management necessity.
East Coast routings add another layer of complexity worth flagging separately. Because Panama Canal transit fees and the longer all-water routing already push East Coast pricing several hundred to over a thousand dollars above West Coast rates in a normal market, any broad rate increase tends to land even harder on East Coast bookings in percentage terms. Shippers who split volume across both coasts, or who can flex between an all-water routing and a West Coast plus rail intermodal option, generally have more room to absorb a sudden increase than those locked into a single port pair.
Blank Sailings: A Blunt Tool With Diminishing Room to Work
Faced with falling rates, carriers have leaned on the same tool they used during the pandemic downturn and every soft cycle before it: cancelling, or blanking, scheduled sailings to remove capacity from the water and support pricing. Analysts at Xeneta warned early this year that carriers would begin blanking more aggressively as spot rates fell across the major fronthaul lanes, and that shippers should factor in the real possibility of a booked sailing being cancelled, sometimes with very little notice.
The trouble for carriers is that blanking only works as a rate-support mechanism up to a point. With so many new ships continuing to enter service, the volume of capacity that needs to be pulled out of the market to meaningfully move rates keeps growing, and each round of blank sailings creates real operational pain for shippers in the form of delayed cargo, missed connections, and unreliable transit times. That reliability cost eventually pushes some cargo toward 空运 or toward carriers seen as more dependable, which does not solve the industry’s overcapacity problem so much as redistribute who bears the pain of it.
There is also a coordination problem baked into blanking as a strategy. It only supports rates effectively when most major carriers pull capacity in roughly the same proportion at roughly the same time; if one alliance holds back while others blank aggressively, the carriers that cut capacity simply hand market share to the ones that did not, without the industry-wide rate relief they were hoping for. That dynamic has made carrier behavior on this front harder to predict, and it is part of why so many rate forecasts published this year have had to be revised within weeks of being issued.
What Persistent Overcapacity Means for Importers and Forwarders
For companies actually moving goods from Chinese factories to US shelves, this is not simply an abstract industry story about carrier balance sheets. It shapes real decisions about how far in advance to book, how much of a shipment’s cost to hedge through contract rates versus the spot market, and how much buffer inventory to hold to absorb a blanked sailing or a sudden rate increase without missing a selling season.
Businesses with predictable, recurring volumes are generally better served locking in medium-term contract rates while the broader market remains soft, since those agreements tend to run ten to thirty percent below prevailing spot pricing and insulate a shipper from the kind of sudden jump seen during this year’s second-quarter surge. Smaller or more seasonal importers, who often lack the volume to negotiate favorable contracts, are more exposed to spot-market volatility and typically benefit most from working with a forwarder that can blend multiple carrier relationships and routing options rather than relying on a single service.
There is also a scheduling dimension that is easy to underestimate. Because carriers respond to soft rates with blank sailings rather than simply lowering prices and sailing full schedules, the number of available sailings on a given week can shrink even as headline rates fall, which means cargo ready dates and vessel cut-off dates need to be tracked more closely than they did in a more stable market. A shipment that misses one sailing in a thinner schedule may sit for a week or more before the next available slot opens up.
None of this means shippers are powerless in the face of carrier-level overcapacity dynamics. Diversifying across two or three core carrier relationships instead of one, building a small buffer into safety stock for peak periods, and keeping a standing relationship with a forwarder who can pivot between FCL and LCL depending on how tight space is in a given week are all practical, low-cost ways to blunt the impact of a market that is likely to stay volatile for some time yet.
How Topway Shipping Helps Shippers Navigate an Unstable Market
Since 2010, Topway Shipping, headquartered in Shenzhen, China, has been a professional provider of cross-border e-commerce logistics solutions built specifically around this kind of volatility. Its founding team brings more than fifteen years of experience in international logistics and customs clearance, with a strong and deliberate focus on the China-US corridor that sits at the center of the overcapacity story described above.
Rather than offering a single point-in-time quote, Topway Shipping’s services span the entire logistics chain, from first-leg transportation out of Chinese factories and consolidation points, through flexible full-container-load and less-than-container-load ocean freight to major ports worldwide, to overseas 仓储, customs clearance, and last-mile delivery into the US market. That end-to-end structure matters most precisely when spot rates and vessel schedules are unpredictable, because it allows a shipper to work with one partner who can adjust routing, carrier selection, and consolidation strategy in response to blanked sailings or sudden rate movements, rather than having to renegotiate each leg separately every time the market shifts.
For businesses trying to decide between locking in a contract rate, riding the spot market, or splitting volume across both, that kind of hands-on, experienced guidance is often more valuable than the rate number itself. Topway Shipping’s long-standing focus on China-US trade also means its team has lived through several of these overcapacity cycles already, which shapes more realistic advice on booking lead times, peak season timing, and when it makes sense to prioritize LCL flexibility over the cost efficiency of a full container.
This is particularly relevant for the cross-border e-commerce sellers who make up a large share of current China-US cargo. Smaller, more frequent shipments are exactly the profile most exposed to a blanked sailing or a sudden GRI, since there is less room to simply wait out a bad week when inventory needs to keep flowing to fulfillment centers. Pairing ocean freight with overseas warehousing close to the end customer, as Topway Shipping’s model does, gives these sellers a buffer that a purely port-to-port freight arrangement cannot provide on its own.
Looking Ahead: What Rebalancing Might Look Like Into 2027
Most industry forecasters agree on the broad shape of what comes next even if the exact timing stays uncertain. Sea-Intelligence’s projection that cyclical overcapacity peaks in 2027 implies that the current stretch of thin or negative margins on transpacific routes still has further to run, and that meaningful improvement will depend on the pace at which older tonnage is scrapped or laid up, how disciplined carriers are about deploying blank sailings, and whether newbuild deliveries begin to taper as orderbooks from the 2021-2023 boom work through the system.
External shocks remain the biggest wildcard. A full resumption of Suez Canal transits would eventually free up vessels currently absorbed by the longer Cape of Good Hope routing, adding yet more capacity to an already oversupplied market, while any fresh escalation in US-China tariff policy could trigger another frontloading spike followed by another air-pocket in demand. Shippers who build flexibility into their sourcing and freight strategy now, rather than assuming today’s rate environment will hold steady, are likely to be the ones best positioned whichever direction the next surprise comes from.
结语
The China-US ocean freight market in 2026 is not defined by a single crisis but by a slow, structural imbalance between too many ships and demand that keeps arriving in unpredictable bursts. Carrier financial results make clear that even healthy-looking spot rates can mask real losses once fuel, fees, and underused capacity are counted, and blank sailings, while effective in the short term, are becoming a less reliable fix as the orderbook keeps delivering new tonnage. For importers and forwarders, the practical response is less about predicting the next rate swing and more about building the flexibility, contract coverage, and experienced logistics partnerships that let a supply chain absorb volatility instead of being knocked off course by it. Working with an established partner such as Topway Shipping, with its end-to-end China-US logistics network built over more than a decade, is one concrete way shippers are managing that uncertainty while the industry works through its multi-year rebalancing.
常见问题
Q: Why are container lines losing money even when freight rates look high on some weeks?
A: Because headline spot rates only tell part of the story. Carriers are also carrying higher fuel, port fee, and charter costs, plus a large amount of idle or underused capacity from the newbuild wave delivered since 2023, so a rate that looks profitable on paper can still leave a voyage in the red once total costs are counted.
Q: When is the overcapacity problem on the China-US route expected to ease?
A: Most analysts point to 2027 as the likely peak of the current overcapacity cycle, with the pace of improvement depending on how much older tonnage is scrapped, how disciplined carriers are with blank sailings, and whether new vessel deliveries slow down as the 2021-2023 orderbook is worked through.
Q: Should importers use spot rates or lock in a contract rate right now?
A: Businesses with steady, recurring volumes generally benefit from locking in medium-term contract rates while the market stays soft, since contracts typically run well below spot pricing and protect against sudden increases. Smaller or seasonal shippers often do better blending contract coverage with spot bookings through an experienced forwarder.
Q: How do blank sailings affect my shipment even if my rate hasn’t changed?
A: A blanked sailing removes a scheduled vessel call entirely, which can delay a booked shipment by a week or more if it misses the cut-off, regardless of the rate agreed. Tracking vessel schedules closely, and working with a forwarder that monitors this on your behalf, reduces the risk of being caught out.
Q: What does Topway Shipping offer for businesses dealing with this kind of rate volatility?
A: Topway Shipping provides end-to-end China-US logistics, including first-leg transportation, flexible FCL and LCL ocean freight, overseas warehousing, customs clearance, and last-mile delivery, backed by a founding team with more than fifteen years of experience in international logistics and customs clearance focused on the China-US trade lane.
