Building a 2027 freight budget in Singapore

Two years ago I moved from New York to Singapore to build Xeneta's Asia Pacific business from scratch. Last week we hosted our Singapore Freight Budget Roundtable at the Shangri-La Hotel, and the room told me how far that community has come. Procurement and logistics leaders from mining, consumer goods, electronics, apparel and food logistics sat down together to work through the same question: how do you build a container shipping budget for 2027 when the market is so volatile?

One thing everyone agreed on. Since Covid, putting a number on next year's freight spend is one of the hardest jobs in supply chain. Almost everything else was up for debate, and that debate is where the value was. Here is what I took away.

Spot rates have risen sharply since February. China to the Middle East is up 558%, the US East Coast is up 327%, the US West Coast is up 321% and North Europe is up 93%. Yet the fundamentals point the other way. Seaborne container trade is growing at around 3% this year, down from around 6% in 2024, while container ship deliveries are set to hit a record 4.7 million TEU in 2028, taking fleet growth back to 11%.

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