New Shipping Containers

What you are buying

What you are paying for is the condition of the steel and the rubber. A one-trip unit has square corners, doors that swing without persuasion, and gaskets that have not spent a decade baking in the sun. On any container it is the doors and the seals that go first, so starting from new buys years before either becomes a job you have to think about.

It also matters where the container will be looked at. A cargo-worthy unit wears the marks of its working life and most buyers do not mind at all. Put one at the front of an acreage block, behind a shopfront, or on a site a client walks past every day, and suddenly the paint matters. New is the answer when appearance is part of the brief.

For conversions there is a further reason. Cutting a doorway or a window into a container that already carries patched repairs, filler or a wavy side wall makes the fabricator's job harder and the finish worse. Anybody doing a fit-out will thank you for handing them a straight box to start from.

Grade matters more than anything else in a container quote. Grade is what decides whether the box keeps water out. Anything sold as cargo-worthy is inspected wind and watertight before release, and new single-trip units — one loaded voyage, unmarked paint, rubbers that have barely weathered — are sealed as well. As-is is the cheap end and carries no watertight claim at all: expect a previous repair, a floor section that has gone soft, or a gasket that no longer pulls up hard against the frame. We list those faults and photograph them on request, before delivery, so nothing turns up as a surprise when the truck does. If what goes inside has to stay dry, start at cargo-worthy.