To add more details to this: To get economies of scale, you want big container vessels. Customers usually want a weekly vessel call to their port. It's impossi

To add more details to this: To get economies of scale, you want big container vessels. Customers usually want a weekly vessel call to their port. It's impossible to fill the bigger container vessels on your own. Therefore there are various alliances, whereby multiple shipping companies combine their vessels and share their capacity. The amount of containers you can put on a vessel is then determined by how much of the capacity you bring in. Simple example: for a service with 7x 10.0000 TEU vessels, if Hanjin owns/supplies two of those 10.0000 TEU vessels, it'll 28.6% of the capacity on each of the 7 vessels. Then you have another benefit that by loading ("stowage") efficiently you might be able to fit more containers than usual. Hanjin is part of the CKYHE shipping alliance. As such, on various (not all!) Hanjin vessels there's not just containers booked with Hanjin, but also from the other shipping companies. According to http://www.hellenicshippingnews.com/ckyhe-alliance-cooperation-confirmed-until-end-march-2017/ http://www.hellenicshippingnews.com/ckyhe-alliance-cooperati...: "CKYHE alliance members Cosco and Evergeen are set to move to the new Ocean Alliance with CMA CGM and Orient Overseas Container Line (OOCL) in April next year leaving just K-Line, Yang Ming Line and the financially struggling Hanjin Shipping." After the financial crisis, it became really cheap to lend money. Various banks noticed that a slight profit was being made in shipping. As a result many new big container ships were built, mainly due to bad decisions within banks. There's now (again) a huge oversupply of capacity vs demand. This has a drastic effect on freight rates. E.g. http://www.wsj.com/articles/maersk-profit-drops-on-weak-freight-rates-1470984856 http://www.wsj.com/articles/maersk-profit-drops-on-weak-frei... has this bit: "Maersk said average container freight rates for the second quarter were off 24% from a year earlier, while the oil price was down 26%." Container shipping companies are often bailed out by countries. E.g. AlphaLiner had a bit (weekly newsletter, don't have a link) where COSCO got huge amount of money (IIRC 200 MUSD) from the Chinese government in 2015 to scrap vessels. This is the only reason they had a tiny profit in 2015. In 2016 the freight rates are drastically lower! Any company will need to do a crazy amount of cost saving, even though a lot of the costs have already been invested (if you bought containers & container vessels they're not suddenly become cheaper to run or to write-off). COSTCO lost 1.1 billion in the first 6 months of 2016 (http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/business/2016-08/27/content_26613536.htm http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/business/2016-08/27/content_266...), though they're likely also affected because they recently merged with another shipping company. Way more capacity than demand. In news articles this is often misinterpreted. Future: If Hanjin goes bankrupt, their container vessels will still exist. These vessels will likely being purchased at a much lower price. To fill them, anyone purchasing these vessels will likely take advantage of the lower purchase price and offer even lower freight rates. I don't expect the supply and demand to change quickly.