TEN years ago, I was working carrier-side in Melbourne when the reports started coming in. Ships holding position outside ports rather than coming in. Not because of weather, not because of congestion, because coming in meant risking arrest. Hanjin Shipping had just filed for court receivership, and within days, vessels were being seized as security for unpaid debts in ports around the world.
I remember what that felt like from inside a carrier's operations. It wasn't abstract. It was the phone ringing with reports of another arrest somewhere, and the constant, live calculation running underneath every decision: help this cargo owner or protect the fleet from becoming collateral in someone else's insolvency. Every instinct said get the containers moving, get people their goods. Every legal risk assessment said touching the wrong box could turn your own ship into a seizable asset in a dispute that had nothing to do with you. That's not a comfortable place from which to operate. It is controlled chaos, and you don't get the luxury of resolving the tension before acting.
Hanjin was, at the time, the world's seventh-largest container line. When its creditors pulled support at the end of August 2016, the company filed for receivership almost overnight, and the fallout was immediate: more than US$14bn in cargo stranded on vessels with nowhere certain to go, ships arrested or turned away from ports across dozens of jurisdictions, and beneficial cargo owners with no reliable way to find out where their goods even were. Within a fortnight, Hanjin was seeking court protection in more than forty countries at once.
For everyone downstream, be it forwarders, BCOs, insurers, other carriers, the problem wasn't just that one company had failed. It was that the failure exposed how much of the system assumed the carrier would simply be there to complete the voyage. When that assumption broke, there was no clean mechanism for sorting out whose cargo was whose, who bore the cost of diversion, and who was liable for what. Contracts that had never had to answer those questions suddenly had to.
That's the real legacy of Hanjin, and it's the part worth understanding if you weren't the one living through it. Letters of indemnity got more precise about exactly what risk they were transferring and to whom. Force majeure and carrier-substitution clauses started accounting for insolvency, not just weather and war. Forwarders got sharper about who they were contracting with and what happened if that counterparty vanished mid-voyage. Insurers began pricing carrier insolvency as its own category of risk, rather than folding it into general commercial risk. None of this was theoretical for the people who built it, it came directly out of watching what happened when nobody's paperwork anticipated a carrier simply ceasing to function.
I've spent a lot of the last year thinking and writing about a different kind of crisis, the Strait of Hormuz, where the risk isn't corporate failure but geopolitics: a chokepoint no single company controls, where war risk, sanctions exposure and transit disruption can hit a voyage that did absolutely nothing to invite it. Hanjin and Hormuz sit at opposite ends of the cause spectrum. One was a company running out of runway. The other is a strait where risk sits entirely outside any individual party's conduct.
But from where the cargo sits, the distinction barely matters. In both cases, someone ends up standing on a dock, or on a bridge, trying to work out who bears the loss for something they didn't cause and couldn't have prevented. Crisis doesn't check your paperwork for good behaviour before it lands on you. It doesn't discriminate between the carrier that mismanaged its balance sheet and the one that just happened to have a vessel in the wrong strait at the wrong time. The only thing that changes the outcome is whether your contracts, your risk allocation, and your decision-making were built for that possibility before it happened — not scrambled together while it's unfolding.
Has the industry absorbed that lesson, or just gotten better at insuring against the last crisis while remaining exposed to the next one? Consolidation since 2016 has left fewer, larger carriers — which cuts both ways. Fewer moving parts to fail, but a bigger shock if one of them does. The mega-alliance structure that emerged after Hanjin makes any single failure less likely and, if it happens, more consequential.
What hasn't changed is the basic exposure sitting underneath every cargo movement: your goods are, for the duration of the voyage, in someone else's hands, subject to risks that may have nothing to do with you. That was true when a carrier went under in 2016. It's true when a strait gets tense in 2026.
If there's one thing worth checking in your own contracts today, it's this: does your paperwork contemplate the counterparty disappearing, or the route becoming impassable, before it happens — or does it only work if nothing goes wrong? Hanjin answered that question for an entire industry, ten years ago, the hard way. You don't have to wait for your own version of it to find out where are the gaps.