Global schedule reliability on a downward spiral

Global schedule reliability decreased in February to a new all-time low performance of 68.4%, down from 69.5% in January 2014, according to the SeaIntel’s Global Liner Performance report for March.
According to the report, Hamburg Süd was the most reliable carrier in February seen from a global perspective, with a performance of 84%, followed by Maersk Line and then CSAV with performances of 79.5% and 75.8% 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 had the lowest performance in schedule reliability, a number of trade lanes improved their performance, including the Europe to Africa trade lane which improved performance by 7 percentage points from January to February this year. 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.
“The continuous drop is now reaching a level that must be very frustrating for shippers. In February, data from Inttra showed 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,” said Alan Murphy, COO and SeaIntel partner. “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% and 44.6%, 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.