The new terminal arms race: how carriers are redrawing the map of container shipping

The announcement that APM Terminals and Eurogate plan to invest €1bn in upgrading North Sea Terminal Bremerhaven marks the latest move in what is becoming an industry-wide scramble for terminal dominance among the top container carriers. The planned overhaul would lift annual capacity from 3m teu to 4m teu and electrify all equipment, with the partners stating the terminal would operate with zero greenhouse gas emissions through the use of renewable electricity — what APM Terminals and Eurogate describe as a first for a German container terminal. Maersk chief executive Vincent Clerc said in the companies’ joint statement that the investment was intended to make NTB “one of the most competitive terminals in Europe’s North Range,” positioning Bremerhaven as a strategic hub for German cargo flows and the carrier’s ocean network.

The project remains subject to internal and external approvals and hinges on the deepening of the Outer Weser river, for which planning is under way. Bremerhaven does not exist in isolation. In the space of a single month, Maersk’s port arm has also moved to temporarily operate the Balboa and Cristobal terminals at either end of the Panama Canal — stepping in after Panama’s Supreme Court annulled CK Hutchison’s nearly 30-year concession — and acquired a 37.5% minority stake in DP World’s Southern Container Terminal at Jeddah, its first entry into the Saudi Arabian port market.

Together, these moves amount to a coordinated expansion of APM Terminals’ footprint across three strategically distinct corridors: Northern Europe, the Red Sea, and the Americas. The impetus is not hard to find. The BlackRock-TiL consortium’s acquisition of Hutchison Ports’ non-Chinese terminal portfolio, announced in March 2025 at an enterprise value of US$22.8bn according to CK Hutchison’s filing, has fundamentally altered the competitive landscape.