Advantage Carrier: John McCown, Nick Bailey and Jimmy Suroto on $6bn Carrier Profits, 49.9% Reliability and a 2027 Overcapacity Warning

Container shipping has become "advantage carrier", according to John McCown of The McCown Report. US demand on the transpacific has been flat for a second year, yet spot rates have soared, and by John's count carriers made around $6bn in net income in the second quarter, seven times the first. So what can shippers actually do about it?

In this container shipping special, produced with the support of Dimerco Express Group, Mike King is joined by three people who track this market more closely than most:

John McCown, publisher of The McCown Report and author of Giants of the Sea

Nick Bailey, co-founder of The Signal House and former lead analyst for logistics and services at A.P. Moller-Maersk

Jimmy Suroto, founder of Nava Analytics & Research and a PSA veteran

We cover:

Why rates have climbed so sharply while US demand stays flat, and what John calls "gotcha surcharges"

Schedule reliability falling to 49.9% in August, the lowest since 2022 according to Sea-Intelligence, and why Nick says a global average hides your real exposure

Port congestion in Asia, a typhoon season John calls the worst in a decade, the Middle East war, and why he believes carriers have learned to profit from disruption

Why Asia-Europe and transpacific spot rates have gone in opposite directions

Nick's argument that supply chains are now constrained by architecture, not capacity, and how to separate customer, defensive and distortion demand

The long shift from West Coast to East and Gulf Coast ports, Jones Act waivers and US maritime policy