Cargo growth firing on all cylinders in 2025

In a five-part series to start 2025 we take a look at where shipping markets are headed in the coming year with experts Maritime Strategies International (MSI).

In this first part the Seatrade Maritime Podcast talked to Adam Kent, Managing Director of MSI, about the overall macro-economic outlook for shipping in 2025.

You can listen to the full interview as a podcast in the player above

Speaking on the podcast Kent started by taking a look back at 2024 which he said had been another positive year for shipping with many sectors continuing to do well on average. The trend for cargo growth positive pretty much across the board with the tonne mile impact of the Red Sea situation supporting earnings.

“For some sectors we actually saw earnings or values, or both, increase by over 50% over the course of last year, most notably for the containers and for offshore,” he stated.

LNG was the one sector where earnings and values fell in 2024 and there was a softening of the tanker and dry bulk markets towards the end of the year.

Moving onto 2025 he said: “As we look through into 2025, we do expect the global economy to be relatively steady, sort of a similar level to 2024 with global GDP growth of around 2.7%.”

There are a number of potential downside risks. In the US there is the incoming administration of Donald Trump. “That does have the potential to introduce some macroeconomic shifts and some of them might come quite rapidly given what we saw during the first Trump administration.”

The issue of tariffs is high on the agenda, but MSI does not think these will be “too disastrous” for Chinese trade volumes into the US. “We have of course been in this Trump environment and tariff environment before, and workarounds were found by the supply chains. We do expect to see some of those workarounds come to the fore once more as we move through into 2025 and into 2026.”

Kent noted the Chinese economy remained in the doldrums but there are signs of improvement with further stimulus expected this year. Meanwhile he said the European was “probably best described as fragile” moving into 2025.

Looking to maritime he said: “More broadly from a shipping perspective, we do think that this year will be another year when we see cargo growth firing on all cylinders with positive growth across the board, across all sectors.”

MSI sees little suggest there will be any change with the situation in the Red Sea with the same level of Cape of Good Hope diversions continuing.  “That will of course be, remain positive from a ton mile perspective, but we don't expect to see any net incremental gains, from that diversion.”

On the supply side 2024 saw barrage of newbuilding deliveries and this is expected to continue in 2025 starting to put pressure on demand – supply balances in different sectors. “So, this is the start of a wave of new deliveries that sort of began in partway through 2024. We're now firmly riding that wave for the next three years.”

Tomorrow in part two of the series we will take a detailed look at the container shipping market outlook for 2025