Author: Taylor Warfield, Former Bain Manager and interviewer

Last Updated: September 30, 2026

 

Shipping case interviews ask you to fix a business problem at a carrier, port, or freight operator by diagnosing vessel economics, pricing, or network design, then quantifying the fix in dollars. This guide walks through the six shipping case types, the industry knowledge interviewers assume you already have, the math they expect, and a full worked example.

 

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Key Takeaways

 

To pass a shipping case interview, think like the carrier rather than the customer: start with vessel economics, work out utilization and cost per container, then tie your recommendation to an annual dollar figure.

 

• Shipping cases put you inside the carrier, port, or forwarder, not the company paying to move freight

 

• The six common types are freight pricing, vessel deployment, fleet and overcapacity strategy, port and terminal operations, parcel and express economics, and decarbonization

 

• Shipping runs on high fixed costs, so filling the ship usually beats raising the price

 

• More than 80% of world trade by volume moves by sea, which is why every major firm keeps a maritime bench

 

• Know the core math: revenue per TEU, cost per TEU, vessel utilization, head-haul balance, and bunker cost

 

• The container orderbook sat near 39% of the operating fleet in mid 2026, making overcapacity the industry's defining problem

 

What Is a Shipping Case Interview?

 

A shipping case interview is a consulting case where the client moves freight for a living, such as an ocean carrier, port terminal, freight forwarder, or parcel operator. You diagnose a problem in the client's rates, routes, vessel utilization, or cost base, quantify the impact, then recommend a specific action.

 

That last distinction is the whole game. In most operations cases you are the company buying transportation, and in a shipping case you are the company selling it.

 

Firms test this because the sector is enormous and permanently unstable. According to UNCTAD's Review of Maritime Transport 2025, seaborne trade reached 12,720 million tons in 2024 and grew 2.2%, then was projected to stall at roughly 0.5% growth in 2025. A sector that large with growth that fragile generates a steady flow of consulting work.

 

How Is a Shipping Case Different From a Logistics or Supply Chain Case?

 

A shipping case sits on the supply side of freight, while a logistics or supply chain case sits on the demand side. A logistics case interview asks which carrier and mode a shipper should use. A shipping case asks how the carrier should price its space, fill its vessels, and deploy its fleet.

 

The confusion is understandable, since both involve containers, ports, and trucks. But the levers barely overlap. A shipper can switch providers and renegotiate contracts, while a carrier is stuck with billions of dollars of steel that has to sail whether it is full or empty.

 

A supply chain case interview widens the frame further to include sourcing, production, and inventory. Shipping is one node inside that chain, viewed from the perspective of the company that owns the node.

 

Case type	Whose problem you solve	Typical question
Shipping	The carrier, terminal, forwarder, or parcel operator	Our vessels are sailing 80% full and we are losing money. What do we do?
Logistics	The company paying to move goods	Our freight bill is too high. Which lanes, modes, and carriers should change?
Supply chain	The manufacturer or retailer end to end	Where in our chain from supplier to customer is the bottleneck?
Profitability	Any company with falling profit	Why are profits down and how do we reverse it?

 

Shipping cases still belong to the wider family of the operations case interview, so think in assets, capacity, and unit economics rather than brand or market share. The asset just happens to cost a few hundred million dollars and take three years to build.

 

What Types of Shipping Cases Will You Get?

 

There are six shipping case types that account for nearly everything you will be asked. Naming the type in your first minute tells the interviewer you recognize the problem shape, and it points you at the right levers immediately.

 

Freight pricing and rate strategy

 

The client wants to know what to charge and how much of its cargo to lock into annual contracts versus leave on the spot market. Spot rates swing violently, which makes this the most common shipping prompt. In the week ending August 27, 2026, Drewry's World Container Index stood at $4,473 per 40 foot container, with Shanghai to New York at $9,333 and Shanghai to Rotterdam at $4,287.

 

The trap is treating this like an ordinary pricing case interview where you raise price and bank the margin. Carriers compete on a near commodity service, so a unilateral rate increase usually just moves cargo to the ship sailing next door.

 

Vessel deployment and network design

 

Here the question is which ships to put on which routes and how often to sail them. You weigh vessel size against port constraints, transit time against fuel burn, and direct calls against transshipment through a hub. Carriers also blank sailings, meaning they cancel a scheduled departure, to pull capacity out when demand softens.

 

Fleet strategy and overcapacity

 

This is the defining strategic problem of container shipping right now. Maritime Strategies International data as of June 30, 2026 put the containership orderbook at 39.1% of the operating fleet, a level last seen before the 2009 downturn. Cases here ask whether to order, charter, idle, or scrap, which makes them a maritime version of a capacity expansion case interview with a much longer lead time.

 

Port and terminal operations

 

Terminal cases focus on throughput, berth productivity, crane moves per hour, yard density, and truck turn time. The economics are appealing because terminals earn stable fees while carriers ride the rate cycle. Maersk's terminals arm grew revenue 20% in 2025 and delivered its best financial result on record, even as the ocean business saw profit fall.

 

Parcel and express delivery economics

 

Parcel cases swap containers for packages but keep the same network logic: dense volume, fixed sorting hubs, and a cost per piece that only falls with scale. In 2025 UPS reported revenue of $88.7 billion while deliberately shedding low margin volume from its largest customer, and fourth quarter US domestic revenue per piece rose 8.3% even as segment revenue fell 3.2%.

 

That pairing is a gift in an interview. US domestic cost per piece still climbed 10.4% to $12.14 in the same quarter as daily volume fell, which shows precisely how a fixed network punishes a shrinking parcel operator.

 

Decarbonization and fuel transition

 

Shipping produces roughly 3% of global greenhouse gas emissions according to BCG, and the fuel switch is the industry's largest capital question. The International Maritime Organization deferred the adoption vote on its Net Zero Framework in October 2025 and rescheduled it for October 2026, leaving carriers to order ships without knowing the carbon price. Prompts of this kind overlap heavily with a sustainability case interview, so the same cost of compliance thinking applies.

 

What Shipping Industry Knowledge Do You Need?

 

You need about an hour of vocabulary, not a maritime degree. Interviewers will give you every technical number the case requires, but they expect you to know why the industry behaves the way it does. Five ideas cover almost all of it.

 

• TEU: the twenty foot equivalent unit, the standard measure of container capacity, where one 40 foot box counts as two TEU

 

• Vessel utilization: loaded containers divided by nominal capacity, and the single number that most often explains carrier profit

 

• Head-haul and backhaul: the busy direction and the quiet return leg, which is why carriers reposition huge volumes of empty boxes

 

• Alliances: groups of carriers that share vessel space on shared services, which is how a small carrier offers a global network

 

• Bunker fuel: heavy marine fuel, usually the largest variable cost and the reason carriers slow steam when prices spike

 

The structural fact behind all of these is that a container ship costs the same to sail whether it is 70% or 95% full. That extreme split between fixed and variable costs is what makes shipping profits swing so hard, and it is the insight that separates a strong candidate from an average one.

 

Scale is the other half of the story. Bigger ships lower cost per slot, which is why carriers keep ordering them, and those economies of scale are precisely what tips the industry into oversupply when demand disappoints.

 

Concentration matters too. Alphaliner data put MSC at roughly 21.6% of global container capacity in mid 2026, with the top three carriers controlling close to half the fleet between them. A market that concentrated means competitive response is always a live question in your case.

 

How Do You Structure a Shipping Case?

 

The best way to structure a shipping case is to build the carrier's profit equation first, then attack whichever term is broken. Off the shelf case interview frameworks were designed for market entry and consumer profitability, and they fit a fleet problem badly. Start from volume, rate, and cost per unit instead.

 

Use these six steps on any shipping case you get.

 

1. Clarify the objective: confirm whether the client wants higher profit, better utilization, more market share, or a decision on an asset
   
   
2. Build the profit equation: write out loaded volume times revenue per unit, minus fixed network cost, minus variable cost per unit
   
   
3. Split fixed from variable: ask which costs move with each extra container and which are locked in once the ship sails
   
   
4. Request targeted data: ask for two or three numbers at a time, such as utilization by leg or cost per container by route
   
   
5. Test the levers: run the math on rate, volume, network, and cost changes rather than listing them
   
   
6. Recommend and price the risk: state the action, the annual dollar impact, and the one thing that could undo it

 

Step three is where most candidates fall down. If you cannot say which costs are fixed, you cannot calculate contribution margin, and without contribution margin every recommendation you make is a guess. My case interview course drills operations cases like this one step by step in as little as 7 days.

 

What Does a Worked Shipping Case Example Look Like?

 

Watching the structure run on a real prompt is worth more than reading about it. The numbers below are illustrative so you can follow the arithmetic cleanly.

 

Example: Your client is a mid sized container carrier running a weekly service from Asia to the US West Coast. The service is losing money and the client wants to know how to fix it within a year.

 

Start with the profit equation. The service has annual capacity of 625,000 TEU, utilization is 80%, so the carrier moves 500,000 loaded TEU per year at an average revenue of $2,000 per TEU. That is $1.0 billion of revenue.

 

Now split the cost base. Fixed network cost, meaning vessels, crew, insurance, and scheduled port calls, runs $600 million a year. Variable cost is $900 per loaded TEU, or $450 million, giving total cost of $1.05 billion and an operating loss of $50 million.

 

The client is weighing two options. Option A raises rates by $200 per TEU, which the commercial team estimates will cost 20% of volume. Option B keeps rates flat and fills the empty 20% of the ship with lower yield cargo at $1,300 per TEU, lifting utilization to 92%.

 

Run Option A first. Volume falls to 400,000 TEU at $2,200, so revenue is $880 million. Cost is $600 million fixed plus 400,000 times $900, or $360 million, for $960 million total and a loss of $80 million.

 

Now Option B. The extra 12 points of utilization add 75,000 TEU, and each one contributes $1,300 minus $900, or $400. That is $30 million of extra contribution, cutting the loss from $50 million to $20 million.

 

Recommend Option B and say why the answer is counterintuitive. Raising price looked like the profit lever, but with 57% of cost fixed, giving up a fifth of the volume destroys far more contribution than the higher rate creates.

 

Then finish properly. Flag that cheap cargo can leak into existing contracts and dilute the rates the carrier already has, so propose ring fencing the low yield volume to the backhaul leg, and note that $20 million of loss remains, which means a cost program has to run alongside.

 

That last paragraph is what earns the offer. Anyone can pick the bigger number, and very few candidates admit their own recommendation only closes 60% of the gap.

 

What Shipping Math Should You Know?

 

Shipping math is ordinary arithmetic on unfamiliar units. If you can compute the six metrics below and explain what each one tells you, you have enough. The mental math discipline you already build for case interview math transfers directly.

 

Metric	How to calculate it	Why it matters
Revenue per TEU	Freight revenue divided by loaded TEU	The carrier's real price, once surcharges and mix are blended in
Cost per TEU	Total network cost divided by loaded TEU	The number the whole business is judged on against peers
Vessel utilization	Loaded TEU divided by nominal capacity	Spreads fixed cost, so small moves swing profit hard
Contribution per TEU	Revenue per TEU minus variable cost per TEU	Tells you whether extra cargo is worth carrying at all
Head-haul balance	Loaded TEU outbound divided by loaded TEU inbound	Exposes the cost of repositioning empty containers
Bunker cost per TEU	Voyage fuel burn times price divided by TEU carried	The largest variable cost and the driver behind slow steaming

 

One habit is worth building deliberately. Whenever an interviewer hands you a percentage, convert it into containers and then into dollars before you comment on it, because a two point utilization gain sounds trivial and can be worth eight figures.

 

Which Firms Ask Shipping Case Interviews?

 

Firms with transportation and logistics practices ask these most often. McKinsey's logistics practice names shipping as a sector it serves alongside post, parcel, and express, and BCG maintains a shipping benchmark built on data from more than 3,000 vessels.

 

Bain, Kearney, Oliver Wyman, and Roland Berger all serve carriers and terminal operators, with Roland Berger particularly visible in European maritime work. Big Four advisory teams pick up shipping cases through operations and transaction work, and private equity groups that own port or forwarding assets generate their own version.

 

Geography is the best predictor of whether you will see one. Offices in Copenhagen, Hamburg, Singapore, Rotterdam, Dubai, Hong Kong, and Athens sit next to major maritime clients, so candidates interviewing there face shipping prompts far more often than candidates in Chicago or Boston.

 

The preparation also transfers. An airline case interview runs on the same logic of expensive assets, perishable capacity, and utilization driving everything, so practicing one improves the other.

 

What Tips Help You Stand Out in a Shipping Case?

 

Tip #1: Say out loud which side of the transaction you are on

 

Open by confirming that the client sells transportation rather than buys it. It takes five seconds and it stops you building a shipper structure for a carrier problem, which is the single most common way candidates lose a shipping case in the first two minutes.

 

Tip #2: Split fixed from variable before you touch a lever

 

Ask for the cost split early and write it down. Every meaningful decision in a shipping case depends on contribution margin, and you cannot compute contribution margin from a blended cost per container.

 

Tip #3: Treat capacity as perishable

 

An empty slot on a departed vessel is gone forever, exactly like an empty airline seat. Saying this explicitly reframes the whole case around filling ships, and in my experience at Bain it was one of the fastest ways a candidate signaled real industry judgment.

 

Tip #4: Name the competitive response

 

With the top three carriers holding close to half of global capacity, any move you recommend will be visible to rivals within weeks. Address what a competitor does next, because a rate increase that a competitor refuses to match is not a strategy.

 

Tip #5: Anchor every recommendation to annual dollars

 

Utilization points, crane moves, and transit days mean nothing to a client until you convert them into money. Having coached hundreds of candidates one on one, I have watched this one habit turn a scattered performance into a clear pass, and it is the fastest thing to fix with focused interview coaching.

 

What Are the Most Common Shipping Case Mistakes?

 

The fastest way to fail is to run a generic profitability case interview structure and never engage with how a carrier actually earns money. These are the errors that show up again and again in practice sessions.

 

• Recommending a rate increase without checking what happens to volume and contribution

 

• Ignoring vessel utilization entirely, which is usually where the answer is hiding

 

• Forgetting the backhaul leg and the cost of moving empty containers back to origin

 

• Treating fuel as a fixed cost when it moves with speed, distance, and load

 

• Proposing new vessel orders in a market already carrying a large orderbook

 

• Saying "improve efficiency" without naming the lever, the number, or the timeline

 

A shipping case interview rewards candidates who build the carrier's profit equation, respect the fixed cost base, and put an annual dollar figure behind every move they recommend. Practice three prompts this week, one on pricing, one on vessel deployment, and one on terminal throughput, and force yourself to state the contribution margin out loud in each.

 

Frequently Asked Questions

 

What is a shipping case interview?

 

A shipping case interview is a consulting case where the client moves freight for a living, such as an ocean carrier, port terminal, freight forwarder, or parcel operator. You diagnose a problem in the client's rates, routes, vessel utilization, or cost base, quantify the impact, then recommend a specific action. The distinguishing feature is that you sit on the carrier side of the transaction rather than the shipper side.

 

How is a shipping case interview different from a logistics case interview?

 

A logistics case asks how a company should buy and manage freight transportation. A shipping case asks how a company that sells freight transportation should price, deploy, and run its assets. That flip changes the levers entirely. In a logistics case you are choosing carriers and modes, while in a shipping case you are setting rates, filling vessels, and deciding where to deploy capacity.

 

What math do I need for a shipping case interview?

 

Know revenue per TEU, cost per TEU, vessel utilization, head-haul and backhaul balance, bunker cost per container, and slot cost. You should be able to split total cost into fixed and variable buckets, calculate contribution margin on incremental cargo, and turn a utilization change into an annual dollar figure. Clean arithmetic and stated assumptions matter far more than advanced formulas.

 

Which consulting firms ask shipping case interviews?

 

McKinsey, BCG, Bain, Kearney, Oliver Wyman, and Roland Berger all serve carriers, ports, and freight operators, and each runs a transportation or logistics practice that produces these cases. Big Four advisory teams also test them on operations and deal work. You are most likely to get one if your case prompt names a shipping line, terminal operator, forwarder, or parcel carrier.

 

Do I need to know the shipping industry before the interview?

 

You do not need specialist knowledge, but a small amount of vocabulary pays off enormously. Learn what a TEU is, how vessel utilization drives profit, why head-haul and backhaul volumes differ, and why the industry is so cyclical. An hour of reading gets you far enough to speak the language, and interviewers will supply any technical detail the case actually requires.

 

Are shipping cases harder than normal case interviews?

 

They are not harder, but they punish vague answers more than a standard strategy case does. The cost structure is unusual because so much of it is fixed, and candidates who ignore that tend to recommend price increases that destroy profit. Once you understand vessel economics, shipping cases are actually more predictable than open-ended growth cases.

 

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