TEU (Twenty-foot Equivalent Unit)

The TEU is the standard unit of container capacity, equal to one 20-foot container — 6.1 meters long. It is the universal currency of container shipping: vessel sizes, port throughput and carrier fleet capacities are all expressed in TEU. A 40-foot container counts as two TEU, or one FEU.

The largest container ships exceed 24,000 TEU, and global port throughput is measured in hundreds of millions of TEU per year — Shanghai alone handles around 50 million TEU annually.