The World Shipping Council (WSC) released its 2025 annual Cargo Transport Unit (CTU) safety inspection report, sounding a safety alarm for the global maritime shipping industry.

This sampling inspection covered 93,079 cargo transport units and identified a total of 9,645 safety defects, with a defect rate as high as 10.36%, equivalent to more than 10 non-compliant issues for every 100 transport units inspected. The persistently high incidence of safety hazards has shattered the industry's inherent belief that maritime safety risks are continuously declining, exposing long-standing shortcomings in compliance management for global cargo transport units.

From the perspective of defect classification, safety issues are highly concentrated, and two types of hazards are the main sources of risk for maritime safety:

As the export scale of new energy cargo continues to expand, the shortcomings in dangerous goods declaration supervision have become increasingly prominent. Some current maritime shipping rules impose relatively loose constraints on lithium battery transportation. When some containers carry large quantities of lithium batteries, there is no need to fully disclose the dangerous goods risk attributes to the ship operator.

Missing labels, inaccurate declarations, non-compliant packaging, combined with inadequate cargo securing, can easily trigger thermal runaway within a sealed container, leading to fire and explosion accidents, making it a hidden safety threat that cannot be ignored in ocean shipping.

The report points out that the 10.36% defect rate is not an accidental operational error by a single position, but a concentrated manifestation of the loosening safety responsibility chain across the entire container supply chain. Maritime safety runs through the entire process of booking, declaration, packaging, stuffing, securing, stowage, and ocean transportation: cargo owners need to ensure the authenticity of cargo information; freight forwarders conduct document verification; warehousing and stuffing teams implement packaging and securing standards; shipping companies arrange risk-based stowage according to declaration information. If any link is neglected, the risk will be transmitted to the entire maritime shipping chain.

This report releases a clear industry signal: even as maritime industry standards continue to improve, safety risks have not disappeared. The increase in the circulation of high-risk goods and the growing complexity of global supply chains have given rise to many new types of risks.

Foreign trade enterprises, freight forwarders, shipping companies, warehousing service providers, and other upstream and downstream entities all need to abandon extensive operational thinking and re-examine the safety bottom line at each stage. The smooth shipment of goods is no longer the only goal. Compliant declaration, standardized packaging, scientific securing, and safe stowage are the core foundations for the long-term stable development of cross-border maritime trade.