Danish data analysts of Sea-Intelligence have conducted research to gauge the impact that congestion and vessel delays have had on the global deployed liner capacity.
January 2022 saw a record high in terms of missing vessel capacity, as 13.7% of the fleet was not available, according to the company’s data. However, this seems to have improved in February, dropping down to 11.6%.
Sea-Intelligence explained that as the average delays have become very long in certain cases, a few of them will only be captured in next month’s Global Liner Performance (GLP) report, “necessitating retroactive updates to the February data.”
This means that schedule reliability for February will likely be worse than what is being reported now, “as all retroactive updates are for delayed vessels,” according to Sea-Intelligence.
“Using the monthly adjustments of the past year, the February 2022 capacity absorption will likely be 11.7%-11.8%,” noted Alan Murphy, CEO of Sea-Intelligence.
Meanwhile, the terminal congestion index saw a gradual improvement over the past two months in North America, as seen below, but the index is still at an elevated level.
“We see the same trend for intermodal congestion,” stated Murphy. In Europe, there has been no improvement in the past three months in the terminal congestion, and the company sees no sign of imminent improvement.
“That said, on the intermodal side, we do not see as high a level of congestion as in North America, suggesting that the problems in Europe are more heavily focused specifically on terminals,” said CEO of Sea-Intelligence.