Drewry: USWC Delays Hurting Reliability

Congestion issues at US west coast ports contributed to lower on-time containership reliability in November, according to Drewry’s new online Carrier Performance Insight report.

With waiting times at anchor outside of USWC ports reportedly running to one week in some cases, carriers’ schedule reliability has understandably taken a big hit. Drewry’s new online Carrier Performance Insight reported that Transpacific ships were on average 2.4 days later than scheduled in November, more than twice the normal deviation.

Figure 1
Ship Reliability at Los Angeles-Long Beach

Inevitably, the main culprits were ships scheduled to dock at the most affected ports with the on-time percentage for ships calling at either Los Angeles or Long Beach down to only 41% in October and 46% in November, when it had been around 90% in July.

Transpacific carriers are speeding ships on the return leg to Asia in order to maintain some semblance of the weekly pattern, but schedules are not expected to get back to normality anytime soon.  If they are not already, US importers must prepare for further delays or consider switching to the much more expensive air freight option.

In an attempt to ease the situation, carriers are temporarily suspending some calls at USWC ports and it seems very likely that others will follow the lead. Entering the slack season, lower volumes will at least give some respite but fundamental issues need to be addressed by the industry’s stakeholders if this not to be a recurring theme.

Schedule integrity on the main East-West container trades decreased by 1.9 percentage points in November with the aggregate on-time performance for the Asia-Europe, Transpacific and Transatlantic trades falling to 62.4% for the month, down from 64.3% in October.

Figure 2
Drewry East-West Ship Reliability

The monthly decline was the result of weaker performances in the Transatlantic (557 scheduled voyages tracked) and the Transpacific (6,937 voyages) trades. Transatlantic reliability was only 58.9% in November, down from 74.2% in the previous month. The on-time performance of the Transpacific declined by a smaller margin to 50.7% (from 56.6% in October) but with more voyages it makes a bigger contribution to the total monthly change. Reliability in the Asia-Europe trade (6,937 voyages) improved by 1.0 point month-on-month to 68.8%, which helped keep the total reliability result from falling even further by virtue of having the most voyages of all the trades.

Figure 3
Ship Reliability by Trade, On-Time %

There remains a wide variance between the most and least reliable carriers. Maersk Line was the most reliable carrier in November even though its overall on-time percentage was lower than achieved in October, dropping from 83.5% to 79.2%. COSCO was the second most reliable carrier with 71.1%, followed by Hamburg Süd (70.6%) and K Line (68.6%).

Table 1
Schedule Reliability of Major Container Lines in the East-West Trades, Three-Months Average (Sep-Nov 2014)

Drewry has developed the new online version of its Carrier Performance Insight in collaboration with shipment management software solutions provider CargoSmart, using Automatic Identification System (AIS) data to measure on-time port arrivals against schedules on 350 different port pair combinations. The service provides carrier performance benchmarking on a port-to-port, trade lane, service and industry-wide basis, and is updated every month.

CargoSmart and Drewry Supply Chain Advisors presented at American Shipper’s webinar “Are You Choosing the Right Carrier Partners? Using Schedule Reliability for a Strategic Advantage” on 3 December. Both CargoSmart and Drewry stressed that schedule reliability was becoming more important for shippers and that having access to data could help them plan and manage their carrier procurement and their contingency plans.

The CPI is hosted at http://cpi.drewry.co.uk where users can register for a free trial till 31st January.

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With the US west coast port situation no nearer to being resolved, shippers must be prepared for further operational disruption well into the first months of 2015.

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Source: http://ciw.drewry.co.uk/; Drewry Maritime Research; Container Insight Weekly, Week 52