Drewry: US West Coast Congestion Downgrades Carrier Reliability

zoom Congestion issues at US west coast ports contributed to lower on-time containership reliability in November, according to Drewry’s 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. Drewry says that 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, Drewry says 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, Drewry thinks that 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. 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%). 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. Image: Port of Long Beach