2026 freight bid season is closer than it looks. If you waited until Q1 to start planning, you’ll be negotiating from the back foot.
On paper, the story looks simple: global demand growth has cooled to low single digits while a record orderbook keeps adding new capacity. Freight benchmarks on the main east–west trades are drifting back toward pre-COVID levels. Bunker prices have eased off mid-2025 highs.
But underneath that, the market is anything but simple. Carriers are still sitting on high charter and asset costs that don’t normally coexist with soft spot markets. Vessel utilisation has slipped on several key trades, yet the charter market has stayed surprisingly firm, creating a disconnect between what carriers pay for tonnage and what they can realistically earn on freight. At the same time, ships ordered during the boom years are still being delivered, keeping the risk of structural oversupply in play even if demand picks up.
Layer on top the delayed 2026 Chinese New Year, ongoing Red Sea routing uncertainty and EU carbon costs, and you get a market that is soft on average but volatile week-to-week.
That’s why 2026 is a once-in-a-decade opportunity only for shippers who treat procurement as a data problem, not just a rate-shopping exercise.
To support that shift, Bluspark has published the 2026 Ocean Procurement Cheat Sheet, a practical guide that walks BCOs through how to use allocation strategy, carrier performance and operational market data to win in this soft but complex market.
Download the 2026 Ocean Procurement Cheat Sheet
Start with your 2025 reality, not a generic benchmark
Before you invite a single bid, you should be able to answer three basic questions for each major lane:
1. What actually happened in 2025?
- Volumes (planned vs actual)
- All-in cost per FEU (including BAF, surcharges and accessorials)
- Where you paid above or below the market on long-term rates
2. Where did operations feel the most friction?
- Roll rates, schedule reliability and premium usage
- Port and terminal dwell times
- Blank sailings and skipped calls that hit key SKUs or customers
3. What changed in your network?
- New origins, DCs or gateways
- Customers that became more time-sensitive
- Shifts between IPI and port-centric flows
Most teams never put all of that into one view. The result: RFQs that chase a notional “market rate” while ignoring lanes where poor performance quietly burned margin all year.
A stronger 2026 strategy starts by building lane-level forecast bands (low / base / high) for volume and cost, grounded in how your 2025 actually behaved rather than how it was supposed to behave.
Bring procurement and operations to the same table
In 2026, rate decisions and operational decisions are the same decision.
Your procurement plan should explicitly answer:
- Which carriers have consistently delivered the service levels you need on your critical lanes?
- Where does their capacity actually sit in 2026 given new services, blank sailings and the Red Sea routing pattern?
- Which ports and terminals are you willing to bet on from a dwell, congestion and chassis perspective?
- Where should you change Incoterms so you, not your suppliers, control carrier and routing decisions?
Bluspark’s intelligence layer blends your internal execution data with external market signals so you can see where you’re overpaying for under-performance and where you can safely lean into carriers, gateways and partners that have earned a bigger share of your volume.
Use a three-legged capacity strategy, not a single bet
The core of our 2026 approach is simple: don’t balance on one leg.
Instead, build a “three-legged stool” across:
1. Fixed carrier contracts
- Anchor mission-critical lanes and SKUs
- Lock in predictable MQCs and service commitments
- Reflect realistic assumptions about routing (Red Sea / Suez vs Cape) and schedule changes
Avoid the temptation to lock everything too early. With a late Chinese New Year and capacity still being delivered into the market, the true 2026 floor will emerge gradually through Q1.
2. NVOCC programs
- Cover new lanes and emerging sourcing regions without over-committing carrier MQCs
- Backstop disruptions on your fixed contracts
- Introduce competition where carrier concentration is high
3. Shipper associations and buying groups
- Aggregate volume on secondary lanes where you don’t have enough scale alone
- Gain access to peer insights on carrier and terminal performance
- Create a credible alternative to both your own contracts and NVO options
In a structurally oversupplied market with charter costs still elevated, you want flexibility and options, not a single “hero” contract.
Turn insight into an RFQ and a routing guide
Once you have your data and three-leg strategy defined, your 2026 prep comes down to execution:
- RFQ design – Standardised templates, clear evaluation criteria and an explicit message to carriers that you’re scoring on total value (cost + performance + resilience), not just headline base rates.
- Award logic – Use your forecast bands and operational data to avoid over-awarding to carriers or ports that struggled through 2025.
- Routing guide + capacity playbook – Translate awards into lane-by-lane rules: primary / secondary / emergency options, when to shift to NVO or association capacity, and which Incoterms to use by lane and customer.
We recommend two formal “governance pulses” after go-live:
- Post-CNY (March / April) – Check how the extended pre-CNY season behaved and adjust where the market moved faster than expected.
- Pre-peak (late summer) – Decide whether to renew, rebid or reshape your portfolio ahead of Q4 and the 2027 cycle.
Where Bluspark fits
Bluspark helps BCOs move from one-off bid events to a continuous, data-driven procurement rhythm by:
- Integrating pricing and operational data into a single intelligence layer.
- Building lane-level forecast bands that reflect both structural oversupply and the charter–freight disconnect going into 2026.
- Designing and running RFQs that implement a three-legged capacity strategy across fixed contracts, NVOCCs and associations.
- Translating awards into live routing guides, dashboards and governance so finance, operations and leadership stay aligned all year.
If your goal is a clear, fact-based, resilient procurement strategy for 2026, the time to start is now—not when the first carrier asks for revised volumes.
