The US tariff war continues to directly affect container shipping operations, as the number of cancelled sailings on the Transpacific trade increased drastically this past week, according to the latest Sea-Intelligence report.
Danish shipping data analysts explain: “When we look at the data, it is quite evident that the impact of the trade war has caused many shippers to pause, or outright cancel, shipments. This, in turn, reduces demand for capacity on container vessels, to which carriers respond by cancelling sailings.”
The following figure shows scheduled blanked capacity as a percentage of planned capacity on Asia-North America East Coast, for the weeks in the period from March 24 to May 12, as it was scheduled at different points in time, during weeks 12-16.
The purple line shows the scheduled blanked share as recorded in the past week (week 16).
Sea-Intelligence analysts noted: “In week 12 (dark blue line), the scheduled blanked share was 0% in most weeks from April 7 to May 12. There is now a major spike in blank sailings for the week starting on May 5, which is quite extreme. By week 15, carriers had scheduled blanked capacity equalling 35% of the planned capacity for that week, starting May 5. At week 16, however, this increased to 42% of the total offered capacity, which is a 7 percentage point increase week/week.
“On Asia-North America West Coast, we see this escalation a week earlier. For the week starting April 28, 13% of the offered capacity was scheduled to be blanked as of week 15, which more than doubled to 28% as of week 16.”
This level of escalation in blanked capacity illustrates a dramatic change in the market, according to Alan Murphy, CEO of Sea-Intelligence, “partly from the perspective of the magnitude of the blank sailings, which are more akin to what we tend to see seasonally following Chinese New Year in January/February and Chinese Golden Week in October – and partly from the perspective that many of these blank sailings have been announced with very limited advance warning to the shippers.”
