Record-low global schedule reliability of 44.6% in December 2020

Sea-Intelligence has published issue 113 of the Global Liner Performance (GLP) report, with schedule…

Sea-Intelligence has published issue 113 of the Global Liner Performance (GLP) report, with schedule reliability figures up to and including December 2020. As the report itself is quite comprehensive and covers schedule reliability across 34 different trades lanes and 60+ carriers, this press release will only cover the global highlights from the full report.

Global schedule reliability dropped to 44.6% in December 2020, which means that for the fifth consecutive month, global schedule reliability has been the lowest across all months since Sea-Intelligence introduced the benchmark in 2011. Compared to December 2019, schedule reliability is -31.7 percentage points lower, and is the fifth consecutive month that we have recorded a double-digit Y/Y decline. We also see a similar trend with the average delay for LATE vessel arrivals, which has recorded consecutive M/M increases for the past four months, reaching 5.74 days in December.

In December 2020, Hamburg Süd was the most reliable carrier with 55.3% schedule reliability. However, we can see in figure 3 how significant the deterioration is compared to December 2019. Only HMM and ZIM recorded a M/M improvement in schedule reliability, whereas none of the carriers recorded a Y/Y improvement in schedule reliability, with Maersk Line recording the smallest decline of a still-staggering -27.5 percentage points.

This slump in schedule reliability coincided with the carriers’ introduction of capacity on the major trade lanes, above and beyond what we have seen before. With continued widespread port congestion, and with carriers still not letting off capacity-wise (especially on the major trades) not even for Chinese New Year, shippers might not see improving schedule reliability until 2021-Q2.