Category: Containers & equipment
TEU (Twenty-foot Equivalent Unit)
Also known as: Twenty-foot Equivalent Unit
Definition
The standard capacity unit equal to one 20ft container, used to measure vessel and terminal volumes.
A TEU represents the volume of one standard 20ft container. It is the industry’s common denominator: a 40ft container counts as two TEU, so ship sizes, port throughput, and trade-lane volumes are all quoted in TEU.
The TEU normalizes mixed fleets of 20ft and 40ft boxes into a single comparable figure. The largest container vessels today exceed 24,000 TEU of nominal capacity.
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