Container shipping’s TEU-to-GDP multiplier has continued to weaken since the pandemic, with the last ten years now showing an average multiplier below 1.
The ratio, which hit its peak in the 1990s and was still a robust 2.6x in the noughties, had previously been a reliable indicator for the market, such that the container trade could be relied on to expand by multiples of GDP growth.
This has now shifted, and the average ratio of container trade growth to worldeconomic growth in the last decade has dropped to 0.93x, with only the individual years of 2014, 2017 and 2018 exceeding 1 by a significant margin (1.4x, 1.8x and 1.4x respectively).
Source: Alphaliner
