Asia Container Drewry Index Intra: What It Is and How to Read It

The Drewry Intra-Asia Container Index (IACI) is a weekly benchmark for the price of moving a 40-foot container between ports within Asia, published every Thursday in US dollars. For the week of 29 October 2026 it climbed $46 to $1,504 per box, within striking distance of the all-time high. If your search for the Drewry intra Asia container index came up against our October 2 story on a sixth straight record, this piece explains what the index measures, how to read a specific dated quote, and what comes next.

Readers who type the phrase with a date attached, as many do, are usually asking one question: what was the index worth on that week? The short answer is that every Thursday Drewry reprices a basket of short-haul Asian trades, most of them out of Shanghai, and folds them into a single dollar-per-40-foot number. That is the figure the index reports. A quote for the week of 8 October, to take a common search, is simply the assessment Drewry published on that Thursday, before intra-week spot moves were repriced into the following week's print.

Related reading: Container rates snap back: Drewry WCI composite jumps 3% to $4,485 as Asia-Europe legs reprice.

What the IACI actually tracks

Unlike the World Container Index (WCI), which bundles the long-haul east-west trades that link Asia to Europe and to North America, the IACI is confined to the short-haul lanes that move cargo within Asia: Shanghai to Ho Chi Minh City, Shanghai to Manila, and the other regional strings. In early October, Shanghai to Ho Chi Minh City and Shanghai to Manila each rose 7% in a single week, and port waits at Shanghai reached 82 hours with Ningbo at 56 in week 39 of the year, the kind of congestion that pulls a short-haul rate up fast. Freight buyers and procurement teams watch the IACI precisely because it is a cleaner read on regional Asian capacity than the headline WCI, which in the same period was being dragged down by loosening trans-Pacific demand.

Because that distinction is easy to miss, an intra-Asia quote is often confused with a global one. The single most useful habit when reading any container-rate number is to check which index it names. A price attached to the WCI composite reflects the average across the major east-west lanes; a price on the IACI names the short-haul Asian basket. Mixing the two produces a comparison that is not apples to apples, which is how headline numbers on different trades end up telling opposite stories in the same week. On 29 October that is exactly what happened, with the global composite down while the regional index rose, a divergence that is the norm in a year when regional congestion, not world trade, is the dominant force on short-haul rates.

Related reading: Container Freight Rates: Drewry WCI Falls 2% to $4,351.

How to read a dated quote

Three pieces of context separate a usable IACI figure from a misleading one. The first is the week. The index is a point-in-time Thursday assessment, so a number is only meaningful with its print date, which is why dated searches matter. The second is the pricing basis: the index is freight-only, before surcharges and ancillary charges, quoted per 40-foot container. A quote that does not specify the box size or the week cannot be compared to another. Third, treat a single weekly print as one observation in a trend, not a level. The 29 October move of $46, or about 3%, is notable mainly because it followed two weeks in which the index had been drifting lower from the early-October record; the sequence matters more than any one Thursday.

Where the index is now and what is dated next

The IACI has been in a sustained uptrend through the autumn. It printed a sixth consecutive weekly record at $1,518 per 40-foot box on 1 October, cooled for a stretch of weeks, then resumed higher with the $46 climb to $1,504 on 29 October. The move keeps the index near its highest levels on record even as the broader WCI composite fell 3% to $4,429 that same week, a reminder that regional Asian pricing is running on its own congested-routes logic rather than following the long-haul benchmark.

Related reading: Shanghai to New York Freight Rose 7% to $10,428 as WCI Fell 1%.

The next scheduled assessment is the publication for the week of 5 November, which Drewry will release on Thursday. The two things freight watchers will be looking for are how the post-Golden-Week volume lull in the region affects the South China and Southeast Asian lanes, and whether port-congestion wait times at Shanghai and Ningbo start to ease, since those waits are the near-term support under regional rates. Fuel surcharges, tied to a bunker price that has been firming with crude near $103 a barrel, remain the upside risk to the printed index in the weeks ahead.

For the longer arc of this run and the record set earlier this year, our October 2 breakdown of how typhoon disruption, vessel bunching and fuel charges pushed the IACI to $1,518 lays out the drivers route by route. The index that prints on 5 November will tell us whether the autumn trend has resumed for good or whether the two quieter weeks were the start of a normal seasonal breather.

This content is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Consult a qualified financial advisor before making investment decisions.