Ports and inland networks are buckling under container volumes after roughly 15 years of underinvestment, Maersk CEO Vincent Clerc told the Financial Times, even as the group raised its full-year bottom-line guidance for the second time this year. The bottlenecks extend beyond the terminals as rail, trucking, and barge capacity are also falling behind across Europe, Brazil, and Africa.
There is no quick fix: “What it’s going to take to catch up on 15 years of underinvestment is a bit of a catch-up cycle on infrastructure investments,” Clerc said, warning that landside bottlenecks could make periods of supply-chain volatility more frequent, even as the container shipping industry adds new vessels.
The capacity crunch is paying, for now: Congestion limits how much cargo the system can move efficiently, lifting freight rates and carrier earnings — a gain in the short term, but not one carriers can bank on, since they depend on the same strained infrastructure to keep their wider logistics business moving.
The bigger picture: As geopolitical volatility puts backup routes in focus, they are only as resilient as the infrastructure behind them. Reopening chokepoints — or diverting cargoes around them — may create optionality, but not effective redundancy if networks cannot absorb additional volumes. Maersk’s warning shows why resilience must be measured across the full trade corridor. A route on the map is not necessarily usable capacity.
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