July saw global schedule reliability peak at 83 percent following an extended period of monthly improvements. However, August saw these improvements eliminated as schedule reliability declined to just 77 percent across more than 10,000 vessel arrivals during August. This decline was also seen for the delivery of the individual containers, where global on-time performance declined from 68 percent in July to 64 percent in August based on data from INTTRA.

The decline in on-time delivery was less severe than for schedule reliability, indicating that some of the gains seen in container delivery had been due to other factors than the timeliness of the vessels.

The declines were not confined to individual carriers, as all top-20 carriers saw a decline in global reliability in August, although some saw larger declines than others. The top-3 performers in August were Maersk Line, Hamburg Süd and APL. They achieved this ranking by being amongst the carriers experiencing only relatively minor declines in schedule reliability in August.

Although the global reliability declined, we saw significant differences across individual trade lanes. The back haul trade from Europe to Asia as well as the Trans-Pacific trade saw significant performance reductions. However some trades, such as the head haul trade from Asia to the Mediterranean, actually saw improved performance in August.

The sharp reduction is seen to be a consequence of poor weather conditions, port issues as well as the phasing-in of super slow-steaming on main back-haul trades.

The data underlying the analysis stems from SeaIntel Maritime Analysis' database encompassing more than 120,000 vessel arrivals as well as INTTRA's database encompassing more than 800,000 container status messages daily.

Source: SeaIntel Maritime Analysis