Coming back from the depths of the shipping surge experienced in 2021 and early 2022, the container shipping industry is recovering its schedule reliability to levels last seen at the onset of the pandemic.
“Schedule reliability was a staggering 26 percentage points higher,” year-over-year highlights Alan Murphy, CEO of Sea-Intelligence.
The analysis firm’s data shows that the industry bottomed out a year ago falling to a level where only one-in-three ships were on schedule. February 2022 showed just 34.2 percent global schedule reliability, continuing a two-year trend that began in January 2021 when reliability fell for the first time into the 30 to 40 percent range.
“Global schedule reliability increased sharply by 7.7 percentage points month over month in February 2023, reaching 60.2 percent,” says Murphy.
The year-over-year improvements came in across the board among the major carriers. The average delay for late vessel arrivals also decreased, although it has not improved at the same pace as schedule reliability for the industry. Murphy notes that the delay dropped by -0.07 days month-over-month in February 2023 to 5.29 days on average. Sea Intelligence notes that it is also down by -2.30 days year-over-year.
“In relative terms, the average delay for late vessel arrivals is now closer to the 2019 level than to the highs of 2021-2022,” said Murphy.
