Regional container trade imbalances increase 33%

A rise in container trade imbalances has been driven by faster export growth from east and southeast Asia compared with all other regions except sub-Saharan Africa, BIMCO said.

“Since 2019, the global container market has grown 8%, ending at 183M TEU in 2024 according to Container Trade Statistics. However, growth has been very uneven and regional imbalances between exports and imports have increased by 33%,” said BIMCO chief shipping analyst Niels Rasmussen in the company’s Shipping number of the week. 

In 2019, regional imbalances totalled 59M TEU, equal to 52% of inter-regional trade, but grew to 85M TEU and 70% in 2024. In absolute terms, the imbalance in the east and southeast Asia region remained the largest at 42M, up from 29M TEU in 2019. In other terms, the region exported 3 TEU for every TEU imported in 2024.

“The increase in trade imbalances has been driven by faster export growth from east and southeast Asia compared with all other regions except sub-Saharan Africa. In fact, exports from the Asian region have grown by 11M TEU, whereas the total inter-regional market has grown by only 10M TEU since 2019,” said Mr Rasmussen.

In addition, east and southeast Asian imports were 9% lower in 2024 than in 2019, which contributed to a contraction in exports, especially from Europe, the Mediterranean and North America.

BIMCO said historically, the relative imbalance has been the largest in the sub-Saharan Africa region. In 2024, however, the imbalance in North America was the largest. North America imported 2.5 TEU for every TEU exported. In Sub-Saharan Africa, imports were 2.3 times larger than exports.

The relative imbalance also grew in the Europe, the Mediterranean and South and Central America but reduced in Oceania, sub-Saharan Africa, the Indian subcontinent and Middle East regions.

“Imbalances within regions, and specific imbalances for specific container sizes and types dictate liner operators’ cost for positioning empty containers. But the increasing regional imbalances point to a larger and potentially more costly problem. To accommodate growing headhaul trades, liner operators must deploy ever more and/or larger ships only to see a relatively smaller revenue potential in the backhaul trades,” said Mr Rasmussen.