Last week the European Shippers Council (ESC)’s Jordi Espin complained that shippers were paying more for a worse service, this week Sea-Intelligence has shown that he was correct in his view with more services on average arriving late and those that were later are considerably worse than last year.
More ships are arriving late compared to last year, and the reliability is better than 2018, however, of the vessels that do arrive late they are tardier than 2019 and 2018, according to Sea-Intelligence statistics.
Although, schedule reliability was up month-on-month with the May average up 5% on the April record to 74.9%. The figures for reliability remain challenging.
Sea-Intelligence argued that the improving service could be due to greater buffers implemented by the lines to maintain schedule integrity, “However, a recent analysis published in our Sunday Spotlight showed this not to be true. The increase in schedule reliability could then simply be a case of fewer vessels being easier to manage per service string. In which case, a demand resurgence could see schedule reliability drop.”
Late vessels have been arriving over five days late since February, with the exception of March when the service level improved marginally to 4.75 days late. According to Sea-Intelligence the lateness index has “been consistently high throughout 2020”
According to the Danish consultancy’s index Hamburg Süd was the best performing line in May this year while the next best was Zim which was the only carrier of the top 15 lines to perform better this year than last year.
Troubled Singapore carrier PIL was the worst performer with this line, Wan Hai and OOCL all seeing significantly worse performances this year compared to a year ago.
