Ports, Terminals, Canals and Maritime Infrastructure

A container ship is only as useful as the places it can call at, and the places it must pass through. Ports, terminals and canals are the fixed nodes and gates of the ocean network: expensive, long-lived, mostly local monopolies or duopolies, often state-owned or state-influenced, and run by a small group of global terminal operators (PSA, Hutchison Ports, APM Terminals, DP World, COSCO Shipping Ports, MSC's Terminal Investment Ltd and CMA CGM's terminals). Their business is the opposite of the carriers' in one important way: a terminal earns on throughput, not freight rates, under concessions of 20–50 years, so it is steadier through the freight cycle than the ships that call at it. But it lives or dies on reliability and labour. When the terminals at Los Angeles and Long Beach could not clear boxes fast enough in 2021, the queue offshore reached ~100 ships (peak ~109 on 9 Jan 2022, Marine Exchange of Southern California count, reported; verify) and rates on Asia–US West Coast lanes rose more than tenfold from pre-pandemic levels; when the International Longshoremen's Association struck 36 East and Gulf Coast ports on 1–3 Oct 2024, a six-year master contract followed, ratified on 25 Feb 2025 with ~99% support, a reported ~62% wage increase and strong automation protections through 30 Sep 2030 (ILA and trade press). Canals are the other half of the story. The Panama Canal cut transits during the 2023–24 drought and then recovered: 13,951 transits in fiscal 2026 (Oct 2025–Sep 2026), up 4.1%, a record ~521m PC/UMS tons and ~B/.6.6bn of revenue (Panama Canal Authority preliminary figures, 21 Oct 2026, reported). The Suez Canal lost most of its container traffic to the Red Sea diversions from Dec 2023: revenue fell from a record ~$9.4bn (FY2022/23) to ~$4bn a year, recovering only to ~$4.6bn in FY2025/26 (to 30 Jun 2026, +23%, Suez Canal Authority chairman, reported). And ports became geopolitics: COSCO at Piraeus and Hamburg, the US port fees on Chinese-built ships (in force 14 Oct 2025, suspended from 10 Nov 2025), and Hutchison's Panama terminals, whose concession Panama's Supreme Court annulled in late Jan 2026 before the state took them over in late Feb 2026 (reported). This section explains how ports and terminals make money, landlord versus operating ports, the terminal-operator industry, labour and automation, congestion, the canals, US port infrastructure (Baltimore after the Key Bridge collapse), and state ownership. It has no worked example; Red Sea diversion economics are worked in 01 and 22.