Ocean carrier Evergreen Marine has placed $1.47 billion worth of orders for 23 new container ships as the company continues to expand its global fleet. According to Splash247, the orders include a mix of feeder and mid-size vessels and will be built at a pair of Chinese shipyards. The package consists of 16 feeder ships averaging roughly 3,100 twenty-foot-equivalent units and seven 5,900-TEU post-Panamax vessels.
The post-Panamax vessels will cost between $67 million and $82 million each, while the feeders will run Evergreen $46 million to $56 million per ship. Evergreen has aggressively grown its fleet over the past year-plus. In 2025, the carrier booked a $2.8 billion order for 14 LNG dual-fuel vessels averaging 14,000 TEUs each, as well as a $3 billion order for 11 ultra-large 24,000-TEU ships.
The company, currently the seventh-largest container carrier in the world, now has 76 vessels on its orderbook, representing nearly half of its current fleet capacity. From a supply chain perspective, this wave of orders is creating a serious overcapacity risk for the liner market that runs well beyond underlying demand growth. Industry data shows that carriers collectively have hundreds of vessels on order, with the bulk of deliveries concentrated in 2026 and 2027.
A record 633 ships were ordered in 2025 alone, representing roughly 5.1 million TEUs of capacity and pushing the global container ship orderbook to around one-third of the existing fleet. From a supply chain perspective, the new tonnage being deployed by Evergreen alongside Maersk, MSC, CMA CGM, Hapag-Lloyd and COSCO is being priced into spot and contract rates in a way that will exert structural downward pressure for the next two years. For BCOs, this opens a clear window to reassess contract strategies.
