Drewry’s latest analysis finds containership charter rates have remained on a steady upwards trajectory this year and remain 200% higher than in 2019, despite slumping spot freight rates, to which some carriers point as evidence that talk of overcapacity in the market is overblown.
According to Drewry, it is not uncommon for the two markets to veer in different directions for a period of time, but the containership charter market has broken records by experiencing a boom for most of the past five years. Freight rates are much more susceptible to changes in market dynamics, whereas charter rates can often lag freight rates due to multi-month, and even multi-year, fixtures that are set in contractual