A striking chart published this week by Sea-Intelligence tracks the containment speed of every major container shipping disruption since 2012 — measuring how long it took late delays to return to pre-shock levels after each event. The pattern it reveals is one of accelerating recovery: three months after the 2014 US West Coast labour dispute, one month after the Hanjin collapse in 2016, 15 to 26 months for the pandemic, two months for the Red Sea crisis. The Hormuz crisis, still unresolved, carries a question mark.
The obvious interpretation is that the industry is getting better at handling shocks. The reality, experts told Splash, is considerably more complicated.
“The chaos hasn’t disappeared; the shipping networks are just absorbing them better,” said Imaad Asad, shipping analyst at Sea-Intelligence. “Shipping lines have fundamentally shifted their operational strategy to proactively adding buffers into their schedules. During the pandemic, the lack of transit buffers meant that any disruption quickly cascaded into a system-wide failure. Now, by structurally extending transit times upfront, shipping lines are absorbing the shock of these events before they can spread.”
In other words, the industry has traded speed for stability — and the chart flatters the outcome.
Simon Heaney, a container shipping analyst at Drewry, pointed to a more structural explanation. “As usual it’s a combination of factors. The crises are of vastly different magnitudes; for container shipping Hormuz is significantly less operationally disruptive than Red Sea diversions, which in turn was relatively minor compared to covid.”
Delays are getting worse as time goes on
He added that an excess of ships has been central to the industry’s improved shock absorption. “The industry has learned to adapt to a state of perma-crisis, which is helped by having an excess of ships to move about the chess board. Therefore, disruption has diminishing returns for liners. The golden ticket for them is when an event causes a demand upsurge and logistics capacity crunch at the same time. That has happened only on a small scale with Hormuz.”
Judah Levine, head of research at Freightos, agreed that scale matters above all else. The pandemic caused unprecedented congestion across major ports globally, which explains the record-long recovery time. The Red Sea crisis directly impacted a smaller share of overall container volumes and had a viable alternative in the Cape of Good Hope routing, enabling recovery even as diversions continued. Hormuz, operationally, touched only the 2-3% of global volumes that would typically transit the strait. “The level of delays and recovery times are mostly commensurate with the degree of the disruptions,” Levine said, while noting that pandemic-era lessons — particularly carriers holding on to excess capacity as a readiness buffer — are now being applied as new crises arise.
The chaos hasn’t disappeared; the shipping networks are just absorbing them better
Not everyone was prepared to read the chart as a success story. Peter Tirschwell, founder of the TPM conference, pushed back firmly. “What is most relevant is that delays are getting worse as time goes on, not that recovery from shocks may be occurring faster.”
He pointed to the recently published Container Port Performance Index from the World Bank, which tracks lifts per hour data and has never recovered post-covid. “Container carrier leaders speak of long-term worsening of port delays as a reality the industry will have to face likely for years to come.”
Peter Sand, chief analyst at Xeneta, argued that the frequency and nature of disruptions had itself changed. “The frequency of disruptions is higher since the onset of covid — and the impact is more severe compared to pre-covid.” He warned against treating crises as interchangeable. “Crises are always different. If you fail to distinguish the differences and thus also the impact — you get hit.” His broader point was that volatility in freight is now structural, no longer just a risk to be managed but a permanent feature of the operating environment.
The gap between resilience and genuine health in the system is perhaps best illustrated by the World Bank’s Global Supply Chain Stress Index, which tracks the volume of teu caught up in delays. That index is currently running at its highest level since the pandemic peak — above 2m teu in stress — even as the Sea-Intelligence containment speed chart suggests shocks are being absorbed faster. The Shanghai Containerized Freight Index, meanwhile, has ticked back above $2,000 per teu. Faster recovery from individual events, in other words, is not the same as a supply chain operating normally.
