IN Brief:
- Ocean rates slid after a short-lived seasonal lift, while carriers quietly tested shorter routings that could add effective capacity back into an already over-supplied market.
- Warehousing automation kept shifting towards service-style commercial models, as operators looked for throughput and labour stability without headline capex.
- Carbon accounting and trade-rule compliance are hardening into day-to-day procurement work, and 2026 contracts will be judged on data clauses as much as unit rates.
January delivered the kind of month that turns into a long year, where cost and complexity increase through administrative change rather than operational upheaval. Frankly, there is undoubtedly many supply chain managers that welcomed some sense of operational stability.
Freight markets began to loosen, and carriers started edging back towards shorter routings, but regulators and policymakers offered no such relief, layering emissions compliance, border-carbon rules, and new tariff dynamics over the top of already fragile planning assumptions.
Ocean routing and the return of effective capacity
The clearest signal came from Maersk’s decision to implement a structural return of its Middle East–Caribbean Loop (MECL) to a trans-Suez routing, with the first eastbound sailing departing North Charleston on 10 January and the first westbound departure out of Jebel Ali on 15 January. It would be a mistake to treat one service change as a wholesale “Red Sea is back” declaration, yet it matters precisely because it is incremental; carriers do not need a full market-wide return to shorter routes to change the maths, they simply need enough services to start turning equipment faster and compressing round trips.
Shorter routings are the sort of efficiency procurement teams like — until they become a capacity problem. A network that can complete more voyages with the same fleet tends to find a way to price itself down, particularly when newbuild deliveries and extended vessel life cycles are already diluting carrier discipline. For shippers, the operational upside of reduced transit time is real, but the commercial implication is where the leverage sits: in a softer market, the ability to enforce service definitions, surcharge mechanics, and rerouting triggers becomes as valuable as the headline rate.
Spot volatility, then gravity
Pricing in January behaved accordingly. The Drewry World Container Index fell from $2,445 per 40ft container on 15 January to $2,107 on 29 January, underlining a market that can still spike around seasonal demand but struggles to hold ground once capacity and schedules catch up. Xeneta’s January commentary framed the same tension from another angle: a brief early-month lift gave way to declines as offered capacity increased, and the pre-Lunar New Year rush moved quickly from narrative to memory.
That combination — tentative routing normalisation and rate weakness — puts a specific kind of pressure on logistics buyers. A down market creates opportunity, but only if contracts stop treating volatility as an unavoidable fact of life and start pinning it down into enforceable terms, particularly around index linkage, premium products, and the scope of accessorials that tend to “discover” themselves after the invoice arrives.
ETS: more gases, more data, more arguments
While pricing softened, the compliance burden sharpened. The EU Emissions Trading System for maritime entered a new phase in 2026, extending scope beyond CO₂ to include methane (CH₄) and nitrous oxide (N₂O), and moving the phase-in towards full coverage. The shipping industry has been preparing for this in principle since 2024; the difference in 2026 is that the operational reality is now inseparable from commercial terms, because the cost cannot be sensibly managed without credible data, transparent allocation rules, and clarity on who pays when a routing change shifts the emissions profile.
For procurement teams, the practical problem is not the existence of ETS cost, but the way it gets translated into invoices. Without discipline, carbon becomes a surcharge bucket that behaves like peak season: loosely defined, inconsistently applied, and difficult to audit. The companies that will look competent by mid-2026 will be the ones that insist on verifiable emissions reporting, tie pass-through to defined calculations, and stop accepting vague contractual language that simply moves a dispute into next quarter.
CBAM shifts supplier conversations
As if that were not enough, the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) moved into its definitive regime from 1 January 2026. In practice, the year began with authorisation requirements and process change, and it will end with most importers discovering how much time they should have spent chasing supplier emissions data and aligning product codes with the reality of their Bills of Materials. CBAM certificate sales have been pushed to February 2027, with the first certificate purchases and surrenders covering 2026 imports, which creates a familiar corporate temptation to treat the cost as later.
That delay is an accounting convenience, not a strategic one. CBAM is still a 2026 procurement problem because the compliance workflow, the supplier data requests, and the commercial positioning all start now, and suppliers that cannot provide defensible emissions information quickly become a risk, regardless of unit price. The dull truth is that carbon data is turning into a sourcing criterion, and procurement teams that do not standardise how they request, verify, and store it will spend the year rebuilding the same spreadsheet for every tender.
EU–India: a trade deal with immediate modelling value
On a positive note, policy did not only arrive as constraint. On 26 January, the European Commission announced the conclusion of a landmark EU–India free trade agreement, stating that India will eliminate or reduce tariffs covering 96.6% of EU goods exports to India by value, and projecting around €4bn in annual duty savings for European companies. The numbers alone will force a round of sourcing and market-access modelling, particularly for categories where duty materially shapes landed cost and margin, and where India’s supplier base can credibly compete on quality and scale.
If the agreement translates into sustained volume shifts, logistics networks will follow — carriers will adjust rotations, forwarders will rebalance capacity, and inland nodes will feel the strain — which means the procurement upside is likely to arrive with a short-term planning cost.
Rules of origin will also become the gatekeeper; multi-country manufacturing strategies that worked under older assumptions will need to be checked for eligibility, because “assembled in” and “originating in” are rarely the same thing once a customs regime starts asking serious questions.
Strikes, slots, and the limits of contingency
Belgium’s national rail strike from 26 to 30 January hit both domestic and cross-border services, the sort of event that turns port performance metrics into fiction and exposes how quickly “just divert it” becomes “there is nowhere to put it”. For shippers with tight inventory, the lesson was not philosophical; it was painfully specific, showing up as missed cut-offs, yard congestion, and the cost of paying for last-minute alternatives that procurement had quietly de-scoped in the name of savings.
Planning constraints also showed up in the Panama Canal, where the Authority’s enhanced long-term slot allocation programme, LoTSA 2.0, began its first cycle for transit dates running from 4 January to 4 July 2026. Even without a drought headline, allocation mechanics and slot availability shape reliability, and reliability is what procurement ends up paying for when lead times become the product.
Balance sheets and automation: two sides of the same cycle
On 12 January, STG Logistics announced a restructuring support agreement intended to eliminate approximately 91% of its debt and infuse up to $150m of new capital, while continuing operations. For shippers, this is not a reason to panic; it is a reason to tighten vendor governance, because balance-sheet pressure tends to surface as changes in credit terms, service investment, and the willingness to hold risk on behalf of customers.
In parallel, the warehousing market kept pushing automation towards “operating expense” packaging. NEOintralogistics closed a €3m seed round in January to scale a robotics-as-a-service approach for warehouse picking, positioning the model around minimal upfront investment and pay-per-performance economics, while claiming significant labour reductions. The appeal is obvious, particularly for operators tired of labour churn and seasonal volatility, but the failure mode is equally familiar: technology does not rescue weak process design, bad data, or unclear ownership, and subscription pricing does not remove the need for operational discipline.
January’s pattern was consistent across sea, land, and the procurement office. Operational execution stayed difficult, but the bigger shift was that compliance and policy are now dictating the structure of cost and not simply adding a surcharge at the end. Freight rates may be drifting down, and some networks may be edging back towards shorter routings, yet ETS expansion, CBAM workflows, and trade-rule changes will keep forcing supply chain leaders into more documentation and more contractual precision.
From here, it appears that 2026 will stand out from recent years in that resilience may not be the word of the year; at least not in the way we have been conditioned to think of the phrase. It seems those businesses best positioned for success are the ones that can prove their numbers, enforce their terms, and keep moving when the paperwork is designed to slow them down.
