Delays hit named-day promises for six

Lines still succeeding, but at a cost ALAN PEAT IS A named-day shipping service still possible, or are the delays at the Port of Durban now making this a misnomer? Possible, two shipping line executives told FTW in answer to this question posed by a number of readers, but getting to the edges of impossibility. “We’re still offering a named-day service,” said Flemming Dalgaard, MD of Maersk Sealand in SA. “But, with a current five day delay in Durban, we soon won’t have a buffer in our schedule any more.” Cape Town and Port Elizabeth are still performing “relatively well”, he added - and at least not adding injury to Durban’s insult. It’s no new problem, according to Barry New, MD of P&O Nedlloyd. “We are continually having to adjust our schedules in other ports to accommodate the delay in Durban,” he said. “It’s far from desirable, and costing us a lot of money.” An indication of this cost, New added, is that the SA Europe Container Service (Saecs) is having to operate an extra vessel in its fleet to overcome the problem. “It could be run with six, not seven, ships if we didn’t have to compensate for delays,” he said. “But these adjustments are all we can do, and I’m sure other services are having to do the same.”