What do Donald Trump’s tariff curveballs and a dried-up Rhine River have in common? Together, they’re turning Europe’s biggest ports into floating parking lots. Rotterdam, Antwerp, Hamburg—normally tight machines—are now bottlenecked for days, with barge wait times hitting 66–77 hours. That’s not a typo. WEC Lines and Euro-Rijn Group say it’s the worst congestion they’ve seen since COVID, and the fallout is hitting every link in the supply chain. Containers are late. Schedules are scrambled. And some shippers are now spending a full week just trying to collect goods across terminals.
Why now? A sudden spike in Asian exports to Europe is part of the story. With US tariffs forcing a trade route shake-up, exporters are rerouting to Europe—fast. DHL estimates Asia-to-Europe container volumes are up roughly 7% year-on-year, and the flow hasn’t let up. Throw in the breakup of the Maersk-MSC alliance and a dry spring that left the Rhine too shallow for fully loaded barges, and you’ve got a perfect storm. Port terminals aren’t built for this kind of sudden volume—especially when sea vessels are themselves delayed. As Euro-Rijn’s van Ommen puts it: “When the ships aren’t on time, nothing’s on time.”
Terminal operators like DP World and ECT are scrambling to plug the holes—hiring staff, upgrading gear, and trying to play traffic cop in ports already bursting at the seams. But WEC’s Caesar Luikenaar doesn’t sound hopeful. Some logistics players are now spending triple the usual time collecting containers. And the idea that this blows over in a quarter? Highly unlikely. “This is not something that goes easily away,” he said. For investors watching the freight sector, industrials, or even global retailers, this mess could take a while to work through—and the risks of production stoppages and rising inventory costs just went up.