Global schedule reliability decreased again in February, to a new all-time low performance of 68.4 per cent, down from 69.5 per cent in January 2014, according to SeaIntel’s Global Liner Performance report of March 2014.
Hamburg Süd remained the most reliable carrier in February seen from a global perspective, with a performance of 84 per cent, with Maersk Line and CSAV being ranked as the second and third most reliable carriers, with a performance of 79.5 per cent and 75.8 per cent, respectively. At the other end of the scale, SeaIntel recorded that Zim, MSC and NYK achieved the lowest performance among the Top20 carriers.
Despite the report showing that February 2014 had the lowest performance in schedule reliability, a number of trade lanes improved their performance e.g. the Europe to Africa trade lane, which improved performance by 7 percentage points from January 2014 to February 2014. However, all the main east-west trade lanes, Transpacific Eastbound, Asia to North Europe, Asia to the Mediterranean and Transatlantic Eastbound, saw their performance decline significantly, by 8, 10, 6 and 8 percentage points, respectively.
COO and Partner in SeaIntel, Mr. Alan Murphy, said: “The continuous drop is now reaching a level that must be very frustrating for shippers. In February, data from Inttra shows that shippers engaged in the Transpacific Eastbound and the Asia-Mediterranean trade lanes would have containers arriving on-time less than half of the time. The same situation is evident for the Asia to North Europe trade lane, but here both vessel arrivals in port and the delivery of the container to the shipper are not on time more than half of the time, as schedule reliability and container delivery reached all-time record lows of 49.9 per cent and 44.6 per cent, respectively.”
At the moment, the performance shippers are experiencing on the head hauls on three main east-west trade lanes is actually lower than the on-time performance on the Asia-Africa and Africa-Asia trade lanes, which traditionally have been the worst performing trade lanes.