Tuesday, November 10, 2026
The news that moves freight
Ocean Nov 10, 2026 · 7 min read

ZIM and CMA CGM lock in ships to 2032

Tracker Air cargo rates · 3.93 USD/kg

Carriers are renting ships to 2032 while the market heads down

ZIM has agreed to keep two mid-size containerships until 2032. The ships are ZIM Norfolk and ZIM Xiamen. Both carry 9,115 TEU (twenty-foot equivalent units, the standard box measure) and were built in 2015. Their owner, Global Ship Lease (GSL), said on 9 November that both were “forward extended for 60 – 63 months”. The extensions start between the second and third quarter of 2027. Both ships currently earn $65,000 a day.

In the same results, GSL said CMA CGM had extended three more ships. One is CMA CGM Thalassa, an 11,040 TEU ship built in 2008. It is now booked until mid-2031, when it will be about 23 years old.

Our view is simple. The number to watch here is not $65,000. It is five years. Carriers are signing long, fixed costs a year before the current deals end, and they are doing it days after a leading rate forecaster said prices are heading down. Carriers do not do that unless they expect to defend rates. Forwarders should plan their 2027 contract talks with that in mind.

What GSL actually disclosed

GSL is a tonnage provider. It owns ships and charters (rents) them to carriers for a daily fee. Its third-quarter numbers, released at 8:00am EST on 9 November, were steady:

  • Revenue of $201.4m, up 4.5% from $192.7m a year earlier.
  • Net income to common shareholders of $99.2m, or $2.75 a share.
  • Adjusted EBITDA of $138.8m, up from $130.2m.
  • Utilisation, the share of days its ships were earning, of 96.6%.

The forward book is the bigger story. GSL had $3.4bn of contracted revenue at 30 September, with an average of 3.5 years left on its charters. It said it “Added $1.82 billion of contracted revenue during 9M 2026 from new charters and extensions”. Its fleet is fully booked for 2026, 98% booked for 2027 and 74% booked for 2028.

It is also growing. GSL runs 71 ships and has 17 on order. Fifteen of them, costing about $1.3bn in total, deliver between late 2028 and early 2030. They already have charters that average 7.1 years. GSL agreed to sell four ships built between 2000 and 2002 for $65.5m.

Shareholders get more too. The quarterly dividend rises to $0.6875 a share from $0.625.GSLcalledit“a25.0%($0.0625 per share) increase in our quarterly supplemental dividend”. The total payout is up 10%. It is payable on 3 December to holders on record at 20 November.

The rate nobody published

GSL did not say what ZIM will pay from 2027. The $65,000 figure is the current rate. For the three CMA CGM ships, GSL said “The extensions have been concluded on confidential terms.”

For the ZIM pair, it did give one clue. It expects the two ships to generate average annual adjusted EBITDA of about $13.5m each. That works out to about $37,000 a day. GSL’s ships cost on average $7,851 a day to run in the third quarter. Add the two together and our rough estimate of the new rate is about $45,000 a day, ignoring overheads and off-hire days.

Treat that as our estimate, not a disclosed number. In our view, even at that level ZIM is paying well above what a falling freight market would usually support for an 11-year-old ship, and it has fixed that cost until 2032.

The CMA CGM deals point the same way. Thalassa currently earns $47,200 a day. The other two, CMA CGM Sambhar and CMA CGM America, are 4,045 TEU ships built in 2006. They currently pay $39,250 a day each and now run to late 2029 or early 2030.

Why that clashes with the forecasts

Xeneta gave its outlook for 2027 at its summit in Munich, as reported by AJOT on 5 November. It forecast global average spot rates down 30% across 2027, against the third quarter of 2026. It forecast long-term contract rates down only 5%.

Its reasons are about supply. Xeneta expects the fleet to grow 6.8% in 2027, after 4.9% in 2026. Carriers are due to take 2.9m TEU of new ships and scrap only 0.5m TEU. Demand is forecast to grow 2.5% to 4%. Ships are also coming back through Suez. Xeneta said about 599,000 TEU has already been freed up from routings around the Cape of Good Hope.

Peter Sand, Xeneta’s chief analyst, said: “Supply growth will outrun demand in 2027, but market fundamentals are easily overpowered by major supply chain shocks”. He also said: “The Red Sea is pivotal to ocean container shipping in 2027 because it offers both sides of the coin.”

Sea-Intelligence flagged the same risk a year ago. In October 2025 it said overcapacity was “projected to peak in 2027 at a level comparable to 2016”. Its forecast assumed a big rise in scrapping, eventually removing the 13% of the global fleet that was 20 years old or more. CMA CGM booking a 2008 ship until 2031 is the opposite of that.

GSL’s chairman sees it differently. George Youroukos pointed to port congestion, extreme weather and imbalanced trade flows. He said “demand for containership capacity has grown even faster than underlying container volume growth.” In plain terms: ships are slower and less efficient than before, so carriers need more of them to move the same boxes. Chief executive Thomas Lister added: “Optionality, prudence, and discipline continue to be foundational to how we operate.”

Xeneta’s own numbers give him some support. Sand said: “Global on time arrivals were 27% in Q3 with Far East to Europe collapsing to just 4% in September.” When ships run that late, carriers need extra ships to keep a weekly service running. The Suez return is also only partly done. Xeneta counted 467,297 TEU of weekly capacity committed to the Red Sea in October. That is about half the level of August 2023, before the attacks on shipping began. If security worsens and ships go back around the Cape, the spare capacity disappears again. A carrier holding a five-year charter is covered either way.

Both views can be true at once. Spot rates can fall while carriers still fear running short of mid-size ships on specific lanes.

What happened last time

Carriers have signed long charters near a peak before. In October 2021, gCaptain reported the HARPEX charter index had risen about 870% from its June 2020 low. Ships above 8,500 TEU were renting for $129,000 a day. An unnamed top forwarder told the outlet the rate environment would last “a very very long time.”

It did not. That same gCaptain report recorded charter rates falling for the first time in 16 months.

The difference now is that this round of extensions comes with lower implied rates and very visible warnings. Carriers know what Xeneta and Sea-Intelligence are saying. They are signing anyway.

What it means for forwarders

Charter costs are fixed. A carrier pays the daily rate whether the ship is full or not. The more of those costs a carrier carries into 2027 and beyond, the harder it will fight to keep prices up.

That points to four things:

  • A wider gap between spot and contract. Xeneta already expects spot to fall six times faster than long-term rates. Carriers with heavy charter bills will lean on contract rates to cover them. Do not expect spot-level cuts on annual deals.
  • More blank sailings. A blank sailing is a cancelled voyage. It is the main tool carriers use to tighten supply when rates fall. Expect more around Chinese New Year and in the slack months after it, especially on Asia-Europe as Suez routings return.
  • Mixed contract strategy. Many shippers will want index-linked deals or shorter terms to catch the spot slide. Carriers will push for fixed rates. Forwarders who can offer both, and move volume between them, will have leverage.
  • Mid-size ships stay tight. The deals here are for 4,000 to 11,000 TEU ships, the kind used on north-south, intra-Asia and secondary east-west lanes. Rates on those lanes may hold up better than on the big Asia-Europe and transpacific trades, where new mega-ships land first.

Our call

We think carriers will hold the line on contracts. By end of March 2027, long-term contract rates on the main east-west lanes will have fallen less than half as much as spot rates from their third-quarter 2026 levels.

We also expect owners to keep winning. When GSL reports full-year 2026 results, likely in early March 2027, we expect its 2028 contract cover to be above 80%, up from 74% today. If both happen, forwarders should treat any 2027 contract offer that tracks the spot slide as unusual, and take it quickly.

Sources

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