For six years, the freight market has broken its own rules about twice a year. Most procurement strategies are still built for a market that sits still between annual tenders. That gap is where money leaks out, on every container, until the contract resets.
Count the major disruptions since 2020 and the pattern is hard to ignore:
- 2020 — The pandemic demand shock. Volumes collapsed, then surged, and rates followed.
- 2021 — The Ever Given grounding. One vessel closed the Suez Canal for six days and snarled schedules for months.
- 2021 — The container and capacity crunch. Equipment shortages and port congestion pushed spot rates to record highs.
- 2022 — Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Sanctions, fuel spikes, and airspace closures reset cost assumptions overnight.
- 2022 — The Shanghai lockdowns. The world's largest container port slowed to a crawl and backed up cargo across Asia.
- 2023 — The great rate collapse. Spot rates fell off the peak so fast that some ex-Asia lanes dipped below $1,000 per FEU by late 2023.
- 2023 — The Panama Canal drought. Low water levels forced transit restrictions on one of the world's busiest shortcuts.
- 2023 to today — The Red Sea crisis. Houthi attacks pushed carriers around the Cape of Good Hope, adding one to two weeks to Asia–Europe transit, with Suez volumes still far below pre-crisis levels.
- 2024 — The US East and Gulf Coast port strike. A three-day stoppage in October, then a second threat in January 2025, sent shippers scrambling to reroute.
- 2025 — Tariff and trade-policy whiplash. New tariffs, frontloading, and route decoupling reshaped where cargo moves and when.
- 2025 — The carrier alliance reshuffle. Gemini, Premier, and the Ocean Alliance redrew their networks at once, triggering blank sailings, port omissions, and schedule chaos.
Eleven disruptions in six years.
Nearly two a year, and the cadence is speeding up.
Putting a clear market view at the center of your freight strategy is a leadership decision before it is a tooling one, and this year it may be the clearest signal of which teams are built to lead through volatility and which are still hoping it passes.
Why the annual playbook fails
Most procurement teams are diligent. They pull internal rate history, gather carrier quotes, and build the forecast before they commit. What often limits them is visibility. They can see their own history and a handful of quotes, but not the wider market moving the same lanes.
In freight, where a single tariff or conflict can reset rates overnight, deciding off internal records and a few quotes means you're essentially buying yesterday's market. When the baseline moves twice a year, that produces four predictable failures. You negotiate against the carrier's version of the market because you have no independent reference. You time tenders by the calendar instead of by conditions. You overpay on spot because you cannot tell a fair quote from an inflated one. And you discover shifts weeks after they hit your lanes, when the cost is already in your numbers.
Read the market as it actually is
Look at what the full picture shows in 2026.
Capacity on the major trades, Far East to North Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Transpacific, is at record highs, with blank sailings running below 10 to 15% of offered capacity. Demand is healthy, tracking around 5% year on year against an original forecast of 3 to 3.5%. On the fundamentals, that is a well-supplied market.
And yet spot rates are climbing and Peak Season Surcharges keep appearing.
The reason is that carriers are managing capacity, using blank sailings and allocation to keep their networks balanced and their rates sustainable. That is a rational commercial response, and a stable carrier base serves shippers too. The catch is that a surcharge is not always a sign of genuine scarcity. Without the full picture, the two are hard to tell apart, especially when a spike may be short-lived as front-loaded cargo clears and volumes ease.
Working from live market data, you can see the capacity that is actually available, understand the thinking behind a rate move, and bring neutral evidence to the table.
What resilient teams do differently
A strategy that holds up through volatility treats market intelligence as a continuous input rather than an annual event. In practice, that looks like four things.
Every negotiation is anchored to neutral market data. Carriers and forwarders control information to protect their leverage. Independent, lane-level visibility into what the market is actually paying, with contract and spot clearly separated, takes the supplier's thumb off the scale. Just last month, a global beverage shipper used that visibility to reallocate more than 3,000 TEUs and hold a carrier to its contracted rates. Another, facing a 100% surcharge request, negotiated it down to a level both sides could work with. In every case, the difference was visibility.
Tenders timed to the market, not the calendar. A tender launched into a falling market locks in yesterday's high. A forward view of where the short-term market is heading turns timing from a guess into a decision, including the discipline to hold back when conditions are not in your favour.
Flexibility built into the contract. A fixed rate is a bet that the market will hold. Index-linked agreements move with the market instead, so a single disruption does not strand you above or below the going rate for a year.
Early-warning loops run automatically. The shippers who absorb disruptions best see them first. Continuous monitoring of your lanes against market signals means you act on a shift in days, not discover it in next quarter's invoices.
The proof is in the percentages
Benchmarking against the live market is an insurance policy that pays back well beyond what you spend on it. Because the same independent benchmark is trusted on both sides of the table, it also makes carrier conversations faster and relationships more durable.
The payoff shows up at both ends of the tender.
On speed, customers run tenders up to 20% faster, freeing skilled people from spreadsheet wrangling to focus on strategy.
On outcome, the gains compound: customers using Tender Experience saw final awards land 23% below market average. The largest single improvement during 2025 tenders was a 68 percentage point swing across three rounds, moving a shipper from 34% above market average to 34% below it.
That return carries across the whole freight book, from rate and tender negotiations to the alignment that comes from procurement, supply chain, and finance working off one source of truth.
See where you stand on your lanes
The teams that come through volatility well share one trait. They can see the whole market, not just their own corner of it. That is how they build a freight strategy that holds up when the market does not.
The next disruption is already forming. The question is whether your strategy is built to absorb it, and that decision is open to you today.
See exactly where you're overpaying.
