One of the world’s largest container ships, MSC AMELIA, has just called at the Port of Hong Kong.
The numbers are impressive even by today’s shipping standards:
🚢 23,656 TEU capacity
📏 400 metres long — almost four football pitches end to end
↔️ 61 metres wide
⚓ Around 16 metres draft
But numbers alone hardly convey the scale.
The second photo was taken from the 30th floor — and MSC AMELIA still dominates the view of the container terminal below. A vessel of this class rises roughly to the height of a 20-storey building from keel to its highest structures.
Ships like MSC AMELIA are floating pieces of global infrastructure: almost 400 metres of engineering connecting factories, ports, railways, trucks and ultimately millions of consumers across continents.
Sometimes the sheer scale of global logistics is best understood not from statistics — but simply by looking out of the window.
📍 Kwai Chung Container Terminals, Hong Kong
📸 Photos: Maxmodal
#Maxmodal #MSC #HongKong #ContainerShipping #Logistics #SupplyChain #Maritime #GlobalTrade
A few days ago, BRISBANE MÆRSK, one of Maersk’s newest container vessels, called at Kwai Chung Container Terminal 1 in Hong Kong.
At around 350 metres long and with capacity of roughly 17,000 TEU, the vessel represents a new generation of large container ships designed to operate on dual-fuel technology, including methanol.
Seeing a ship of this scale up close is a good reminder of how quickly global logistics is changing — not only in vessel size, but also in technology, sustainability and the way global supply chains are being rebuilt.
The future of logistics is already calling at our ports.
📍 Kwai Chung Container Terminal 1, Hong Kong
📸 Photo: Maxmodalew
Drewry, Freightos, and S&P Global are reporting broad-based rate hikes, while shipping lines are imposing additional surcharges on European and Pacific routes.
This week, a China-Europe freight train departed from Wuhan, the capital of China’s Hubei province, bound for Azerbaijan via the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route, also known as the Middle Corridor.
According to Azertag, the first direct China-Europe freight service from Wuhan to Baku is carrying electronic equipment, household appliances and everyday consumer goods to European markets.
Passing through the Khorgos border crossing in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, the train will continue across the Caspian Sea to reach Azerbaijan’s capital, Baku.
Azerbaijan Railways (ADY) will reportedly transfer the goods from Baku Port to container block trains bound for Europe.
This multimodal journey, which combines rail and maritime transport, is expected to take 18 days, compared to the usual timeframe of up to 22 days.
This new route is expected to provide export-oriented enterprises in Hubei with efficient, stable logistics, facilitating their expansion into emerging Eurasian markets.
Wuhan has emerged as a key hub for China-Europe freight train services, linking central China with over 100 cities in more than 40 Eurasian countries through an expanding network of over 50 routes. Primarily departing from Wujiashan and Xianglushan railway stations, these trains transport a variety of goods, including electronics, automotive parts, and household appliances.
The network is set to grow further in 2025 and 2026, with new routes being launched that will strengthen Wuhan’s role in Eurasian logistics. The latest additions include direct services to Northern Europe, such as Copenhagen in Denmark, as well as a new connection to Baku in Azerbaijan via the Middle Corridor.
Key destinations served by Wuhan’s freight trains include major logistics and industrial centres such as Hamburg in Germany, as well as cities in Russia, Poland, and the Nordic region, including Sweden and Norway.
Wuhan’s rail freight services also benefit from logistical advantages, including integrated customs clearance at Xianglushan Station.
Compared to traditional international logistics routes, the Middle Corridor offers lower geopolitical risk, a more resilient supply chain, and more straightforward transport connections.
Hi
If Your Rate Is Not Visible, It Is Not Sold
Industry Roundtable | Hong Kong | 14 May 2026
In container logistics, bookings are increasingly driven not only by price, but by how quickly and easily customers can access and book a service.
If customers have to wait for a quotation, they are often already comparing and booking alternative solutions elsewhere.
This session explores a practical question:
How can the same transport service generate more bookings without changing the service itself?
Topics covered:
• Why faster access to rates increasingly drives booking decisions
• How service visibility affects sales performance
• How transport services can be combined into complete end-to-end supply chains
• How a single service can be sold across multiple markets and customer scenarios
• How AI can help create and manage multimodal transport services in seconds
• How connected rates enable automatic updates across suppliers, logistics providers and customers
• Practical approaches to scaling logistics services beyond manual processes
Live demonstrations include:
• Making services easier to access and book
• Expanding services across multiple markets
• Creating and managing multimodal transport services in seconds
• Practical cooperation models for carriers and logistics providers
Organized by Maxmodal with the support of Cyberport and the Hong Kong Liner Shipping Association. The seminar focused on practical examples of how digital technologies, connected rate networks and AI can help carriers, freight forwarders, terminals and logistics providers improve service visibility and generate more bookings.
#ContainerLogistics #MultimodalTransport #Shipping #OceanFreight #SupplyChain #FreightForwarding #LogisticsTechnology #DigitalLogistics #ContainerShipping #MaritimeIndustry #Transportation #AI #RateManagement #BookingManagement #Maxmodal
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The price of container freight from Shanghai to various destinations around the world rose last week as evident by the latest figures from the Shanghai Containerized Freight Index (SCFI), published by the Shanghai Shipping Exchange.
The index rose by 1.9% to 1,890.77 last week, following a 1.5% increase the previous week.
Before the war in the Middle East broke out, the index stood at 1,333.11.
On Thursday, data from the World Container Index (WCI), compiled by the consulting firm Drewry and based on a 40-foot container, showed an increase of 0.9% to $2,308.78.
The index has risen for six consecutive weeks as the situation in the Middle East continues to force shipping companies to sail in a wide arc around the Red Sea.
The SCFI index peaked in early January 2022 at 5,109.60, while the most recent significant low was 931.89 in the week ending October 27, 2023.
If your cargo is time-sensitive, February just made the choice clearer.
We’ve added transit time into the Maxmodal indices — and the picture changed.
Rail is getting faster.
Sea is getting cheaper.
But they are not converging.
They are diverging.
Rail = speed
Sea = cost
And this is no longer a temporary imbalance.
It’s becoming the new structure of the market.
Full February report
MSC Mediterranean Shipping Companyextended its dominance in February, with its fleet capacity surpassing 7.2 million TEU , equivalent to approximately 21.4 percent of the entire global container ship fleet.
The Geneva-based group now operates 980 vessels in active service, of which 727 ships totaling 4.55 million TEU are owned outright and 253 ships accounting for 2.65 million TEU are chartered. A further 2.18 million TEU remains on order, one of the highest orderbook-to-fleet ratios among the top ten carriers.
Despite this scale, MSC’s fleet is among the oldest operated by any major carrier, with an average vessel age approaching 17 years. This contrasts sharply with Evergreen, which runs the youngest fleet among the top 20 carriers at an average age of 9.3 years across nearly 240 ships totaling close to 2 million TEU. Wan Hai Lines ranks second at 9.4 years and HMMthird at 9.6 years, having recently crossed the 1 million TEU capacity milestone.
