The map every container sails on just got redrawn
A shipping alliance is a vessel-sharing agreement: rival carriers pool their ships on the big east-west trades so each can offer more sailings and better coverage than it could alone. It is why the line on your bill of lading is often not the one that owns the ship your box actually sails on. For most of the last decade the market ran on three big groups. In 2025 that settled arrangement broke apart.
The trigger was the end of 2M, the vessel-sharing partnership between Maersk and MSC, the two largest container lines in the world. Their ten-year agreement expired, and rather than renew it they split. Maersk paired off with Hapag-Lloyd to build something new. MSC, now the single largest carrier on the water, chose to go it largely alone. Around them, the remaining lines regrouped. By February 2025 the industry had a new map.
A near thirty-point reliability gap
In late 2025, the new Gemini Cooperation recorded schedule reliability of roughly 92% across its services, according to Sea-Intelligence, while global on-time reliability across all carriers sat around 63% in December 2025. That is one of the widest gaps on record between the best-performing network and the industry average, and it means the alliance your cargo travels on now has a real bearing on whether it arrives when it should.
The new alliance lineup
After the 2025 reshuffle, global container shipping runs on four main camps rather than three:
- Ocean Alliance (CMA CGM, COSCO, Evergreen, OOCL) stayed intact and remains the largest, with roughly 29% of global capacity. It has extended its agreement out to 2032, making it the most stable of the groups.
- Gemini Cooperation (Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd) is the newcomer, launched February 1, 2025, at around 22% of capacity, the second-largest network. It is built around a hub-and-spoke design aimed squarely at reliability.
- MSC, the world's largest carrier at close to 20% of capacity, now operates largely independently, with selective slot cooperation on some trades. Its scale lets it run its own network without a full alliance.
- Premier Alliance (ONE, HMM, Yang Ming) is the rebranded successor to THE Alliance after Hapag-Lloyd left for Gemini, at roughly 12% of capacity, and cooperates with MSC on some east-west strings.
Gemini's big bet: hub-and-spoke
The most consequential change is not who partnered with whom. It is how Gemini decided to run its network. Most alliances have historically used a point-to-point model, where a single mainline service strings together many ports, calling at each one in turn. It is convenient, because more ports get a direct call, but it is fragile: a delay at any one of those many calls ripples down the whole rotation.
Gemini flipped that. It runs a smaller number of tightly controlled mainline services between a limited set of major hub ports, then uses dedicated regional shuttle services to feed cargo between those hubs and the surrounding ports. Fewer calls on the mainline means fewer chances for delay to compound, which is how the network reaches reliability in the 90s while the industry sits in the 60s. The design launched with 29 mainline and 29 shuttle services across seven trades.
Fewer calls, more reliability, one trade-off
By cutting the number of direct port calls on its mainline services, Gemini removed most of the points where delay used to creep in, and its reliability climbed toward 92% while individual carriers running the old model stayed in the 70s and below. The trade-off is that some ports that once had a direct call now receive their cargo via a hub and a shuttle, which adds a transshipment leg. Faster and more reliable on the whole, but with an extra handoff to watch on some lanes.
What the reshuffle means for your cargo
This is not an abstract industry story. The alliance behind a service now shapes the experience of the cargo riding on it, in a few concrete ways:
- Reliability now depends on the network, not just the carrier. A booking on a high-reliability network is a very different bet from one on a service averaging in the low 60s. The same lane can have very different odds of arriving on time depending on whose ships carry it.
- Some direct calls became transshipments. Under a hub-and-spoke design, a port that used to get a direct mainline call may now be served by a feeder shuttle from a hub. That can mean an extra handoff, and an extra place for cargo to wait, even if the overall journey is more reliable.
- Transit times and rotations changed. New alliances mean new service strings, new port rotations, and in some cases new transit times on familiar lanes. A route you thought you knew may sail a different path than it did in 2024.
- More competition on price. With Maersk and MSC no longer partners, they now compete head to head on the big trades, which has made pricing more aggressive on some lanes. Good for rates, but a reminder that the network landscape is still settling.
The trade-off nobody puts on the brochure
A more reliable mainline is worth a lot, but hub-and-spoke moves some of the complexity rather than removing it. When your cargo is fed through a hub, its journey now has an extra link: the shuttle leg and the transshipment at the hub itself. Most of the time that is invisible and smooth. When it is not, a missed connection at a hub can hold cargo just as surely as a delay at origin, and it happens at a port far from either end of your booking, where it is easy to lose sight of.
So the headline reliability number is real, but it is a network average, not a promise for your specific box. The way to actually capture the benefit of a better network is to watch the whole journey, including the transshipment legs that the new designs lean on more heavily than before.
Watch the handoffs, not just the endpoints
The new alliance networks concentrate cargo through fewer, bigger hubs and lean more on transshipment. That raises reliability on average, but it makes the handoff at the hub a milestone worth watching in its own right. The shippers who benefit most from the reshuffle are the ones tracking the full path, origin, hub, and destination, so a missed connection surfaces early rather than as a mystery delay.
How to navigate the new map
You cannot control which alliance dominates a lane, but you can make smart choices around the new landscape:
- Know which network carries your lane. Find out which alliance and service your key routes actually run on, because that now tells you a lot about the reliability you should expect.
- Compare sailings, not just carriers. Look at the specific service, its transit time, and its transshipment count before you book, rather than defaulting to a carrier out of habit. The right service on a lane may sit on a different network than you expect.
- Factor in the transshipment legs. If a cheaper or faster routing relies on a hub connection, price in the extra handoff and the risk that comes with it, and weigh it against a direct call if one exists.
- Track the full journey. With cargo increasingly moving through hubs, watch every leg, not just departure and arrival, so a missed connection is something you catch in time rather than discover late.
- Stay flexible while the map settles. The 2025 reshuffle is still bedding in, with services and rotations being tuned. Keep your options open across carriers and networks rather than locking into one view of the market.
The bottom line
The 2025 alliance reshuffle was the biggest structural change in container shipping in a decade. The 2M partnership between the two largest carriers is gone, a new hub-and-spoke network has pushed reliability into the 90s while the industry average sits in the 60s, and the map every container sails on has been redrawn. The upshot for shippers is that the network behind a service now matters as much as the carrier's name on the booking. A better network can genuinely get your cargo there more reliably, but only if you pick the right service and watch the whole journey, transshipment hubs included. The reshuffle split ocean shipping into faster and slower lanes. Knowing which one your cargo is in, and keeping eyes on every leg of the trip, is how you make sure it rides the fast one.