VESSELS’ SCHEDULE RELIABILITY REMAINS AT RECORD LOW LEVEL
On 28 October, analyst Sea Intelligence published the latest issue of their Global Liner Performance Report, showing no signs of any rapid improvement of container line schedule reliability. The latest figures show that just 34% of vessels arrived within one day of their scheduled arrival time in September, maintaining the range of 34%-40% seen throughout the year. On a year-on-year basis, schedule reliability in September 2021 dropped to 22 percentage points. Overall, schedule reliability was at the lowest point in the third quarter since records began, falling 4.8 percentage points from the previous quarter and down by 30.7 percentage points since the corresponding quarter of 2020.
As a result, the average delay across the global fleet was more than a week (7.27 days), improving marginally compared to August 2021. “This means that September effectively saw the removal of 12% of all global vessel capacity from the market due to the delays,” said Sea-Intelligence chief executive Alan Murphy. “One way to look at it is to say that this is the same as the global fleet suddenly losing a carrier the size of CMA CGM or Cosco.”
While congestion and delays are affecting all major trade lanes, wide variations in performance between individual carriers can be observed: Maersk and its Hamburg Süd subsidiary was the most reliable carriers, managing to get more than 45.6% and 38.5% of their calls to meet their scheduled arrival time. At the other end of the scale was Evergreen, where only 13.2% of calls were on time. Nevertheless, all carriers reported falls in reliability, both on an annual and quarterly comparison.
Commenting on the additional capacity deployed by carriers in the fourth quarter, Mr Murphy notes that carriers are expecting the peak season to continue into the new year, or that shippers will attempt to frontload first-quarter 2022 cargo into the fourth quarter of 2021, in an attempt to beat a presumed Chinese New Year capacity crunch. If this did happen, there was a strong possibility that schedule reliability could further deteriorate in the final months of this year.
Source: Sea-Intelligence, Lloyd’s Loading List