Red Sea Routing Splits Again (Capacity Math Gets Messy)
CMA CGM is re-diverting several major strings away from Suez while Maersk is structurally resuming trans-Suez routing on its MECL service. That “split decision” is the signal: carriers are not moving in a single...
International Workboat Show 2026 Review
The International WorkBoat Show 2026 is a straight-to-business week for the commercial workboat world. Owners, operators, builders, and suppliers come to New Orleans to compare equipment, talk real delivery timelines, and solve operating problems...
Venezuelan Crude Reappears in Plain Sight, and Compliance Time Starts Pricing In
Tanker movements tied to Venezuelan crude are now showing up more openly at Caribbean discharge / storage points, a shift that matters because it turns a murky trade into something counterparties have to process...
US Treasury Maritime Sanctions Escalation in 2026 Tightens Shipping Compliance
The U.S. Treasury is no longer treating maritime sanctions as a list of “bad ships” that only a few traders touch. The playbook has become broader and more operational, designating vessels, naming the service...
VLCC Values Up, “Clean” Supply Tightens
A burst of en-bloc VLCC buying led by Sinokor Maritime is firming secondhand benchmarks and pulling compliant (“clean”) tonnage out of the spot trading pool at the margin. Brokers have linked Sinokor to ~25...
Shipping Alliances 2025-2026: Key Changes and a Deep Dive into the Global Players
Shipping alliances are supposed to be “plumbing,” but 2025–2026 turned into a full re-plumb: 2M ended, Maersk paired with Hapag-Lloyd under Gemini, the former THE Alliance partners regrouped as the Premier Alliance, and Ocean...
Misurata Port Deal Puts Libya Back on the Hub Map
Misurata is suddenly back in the Mediterranean hub conversation after Libya’s Tripoli-based government announced a multi-billion dollar partnership to expand the Misurata Free Zone and port terminal, with reporting that an MSC-controlled terminal operator...
LNG Spot Market Whiplash (Modern LNG Carrier Earnings Slide Fast)
LNG carrier spot earnings have softened sharply into mid-January: Atlantic LNG freight at about $26,250/day (down for a seventh straight week) and Pacific at about $41,250/day, while Riviera (citing Clarksons) reported average spot earnings...
Brindisi detention raises the bar as Italy impounds a bulk carrier over suspected EU Russia-sanctions breach
Italy’s financial police and customs authorities detained (and court-authorized the seizure of) a bulk carrier at Brindisi after irregularities in the import declaration triggered checks that pointed to a prior call at Russia’s Novorossiysk...
Port Call Optimization: 2026 Guide
Port call optimization is where “schedule reliability” either gets saved or quietly breaks: a ship can run a perfect passage plan and still lose half a day if berth readiness, pilots, tugs, mooring gangs,...
RightShip Review: Screening ship risk before it hits your book
RightShip sits in the “risk and reputation plumbing” of global shipping: it’s the background platform that scores vessels, vets nominations and flags safety and environmental issues before they turn into casualties, detentions or ESG...
Sinokor’s VLCC Shopping Spree: Concentration Risk Creeps Into the Crude Market
Sinokor’s fast accumulation of VLCC tonnage has become the kind of S&P cycle that changes behavior beyond the ships actually sold: secondhand price talk firms up, pool and chartering lineups get reshuffled, and “clean,...
Breakbulk Asia 2026 Review
Breakbulk Asia 2026 is a new Singapore stop for the project cargo community, built for the practical conversations that shape 2026 and 2027 moves. If you touch heavy lift, OOG, modules, or industrial cargo...
Ship Universe Weekly Recap
This is a full rundown of this week’s coverage on Ship Universe. To get this by email every Saturday, subscribe here. Ship Universe Weekly It was a busy week for shipping, with shifting risk...
Top 30 Maritime Piracy Incidents in 2025
2025 didn’t look like a clean “one-region problem” for piracy. The year’s most serious cases spread from guns-and-hostages boardings in the Singapore Strait, to crew-take kidnappings in West Africa, to a Somalia-area resurgence with...
Hengli Heavy’s $1.9bn build-out as shipyard capacity growth pushes deeper into the 2028–2029 cycle
Hengli Heavy Industry says it will invest about 13.5 billion yuan (roughly $1.9bn) in a major capacity expansion at its Dalian-area complex, a yard that has rapidly stacked an orderbook reportedly stretching into 2029....
Autonomous Navigation Goes Fleet-Scale
HMM has signed contracts with HD Hyundai’s Avikus to deploy its AI-based autonomous navigation solution (HiNAS Control) across 40 HMM-operated vessels, paired with an MOU with HD Korea Shipbuilding & Offshore Engineering (HD KSOE)...
HMM Goes Big on Autonomous Navigation
HMM has signed contracts to install HD Hyundai Avikus’s AI-based autonomous navigation system across 40 HMM-operated vessels, moving the tech from limited trials into a broad operational deployment. The shipping impact is less about...
Orca AI Review: A Digital Lookout for Real-world Risk
Orca AI sits in the “digital watchkeeper” slot on a modern bridge: cameras, sensors and AI algorithms watching 24/7, flagging the targets that matter and feeding shore teams with hard data on how voyages...
Court Orders Put Offshore Wind Back on the Water and Shipping Feels It First
A string of court moves is reopening offshore wind construction just as winter calendars and vessel availability get tight. Equinor’s Empire Wind has been cleared to restart work after a judge weighed “irreparable harm”...
AI ETA Prediction for Ships: 2026 Guide
AI ETA prediction is where a lot of “shipping delays” quietly get decided: if your ETA is wrong, everything downstream gets noisy (berth plans, pilots, yard moves, trucking windows, and customer updates). Going into...
Piracy Baseline Resets Upward
ICC IMB’s annual Jan–Dec 2025 data shows 137 piracy and armed robbery incidents globally, with the Singapore Straits alone accounting for 80 of them and perpetrators succeeding in 91% of incidents. It is not...
Intermodal Europe 2026 Review
Intermodal Europe 2026 is a container-industry meet-up built for real procurement conversations: equipment owners, lessors, manufacturers, tech providers, and operators comparing boxes, monitoring, M&R, leasing structures, repositioning workflows, and the practical details that decide...
Chornomorsk Berth Strike: Black Sea port-call risk pricing
A reported ballistic-missile strike hit port infrastructure at Chornomorsk on January 15, 2026, damaging a Malta-flagged civilian vessel that was preparing to load containerized cargo, with one crew member reported injured. Ukrainian officials’ statements...
US Seizes Sixth Sanctioned Tanker
A pre-dawn interdiction of the Guyana-flagged Aframax Veronica in the Caribbean marks the sixth Venezuela-linked tanker seized since mid-December, reinforcing that sanctions enforcement is now a capacity and scheduling variable for tankers trading near...
Big 5 Breakdown: Size, Fuel Burn, and Carrying Capacity
Modern liner networks aren’t built around “a ship,” they’re built around five physical constraints that drive everything else: how big you can fit through canals and ports, how much you can carry in TEU...
Caribbean Compliance Shockwave as U.S. Warrants Target “Dozens” of Venezuela-Linked Tankers, and the Trade Tightens Overnight
A reported push to secure court warrants for dozens more Venezuela-linked tankers, paired with fresh at-sea seizures, is turning the Caribbean into a higher-friction operating zone for any voyage that even loosely touches Venezuelan...
Maersk puts MECL back through Suez in a structural Red Sea return with real network consequences
Maersk has decided to route its MECL service (Middle East/India ↔ U.S. East Coast) back through the Suez Canal and Red Sea as a structural change rather than isolated test transits. That matters because...
AI Collision Avoidance for Ships: 2026 Guide
AI collision avoidance is basically the industry’s attempt to turn “what the bridge team already does” into a more consistent, less fatigue-sensitive process: detect early, classify correctly, fuse sensor inputs, and suggest COLREG-aware actions...
Red Sea Routing Optionality Reopens
Maersk says it will structurally return its MECL service to the trans-Suez / Red Sea route (first sailings mid-January, with the service change taking effect on a late-January departure), while the UN Security Council...