by Priya Radünzel, SeaNewsEditor
The Seaexplorer Schedule Reliability Report for July revealed an overall decline in global on-time performance to 46%.
However, on a trade level, only three of the 11 major trades saw improvements.
Among these, the Asia↔North Europe trade lane recorded the largest gain of 8.1 percentage points. (For more details on this trade lane, refer to our latest report)
Despite the global decline, the Asia↔North America trade maintained its performance, with a slight increase from 56.6% to 57.5%.
Below, we take a closer look at the performance per leg and the average arrival delays of vessels.
Asia→North America
On the headhaul, on-time performance decreased by 4.6 percentage points to 52.7%.
As illustrated in the figure below, this level is similar to that seen in May.
Despite losing June gains, July’s performance was 7.1 percentage points higher than July 2023.
LATE vessels arriving at North American ports averaged a delay of 3.8 days, a slight improvement of 0.1 days month-on-month.
For ALL vessels, the average arrival delay remained unchanged at 1.5 days, which is 0.4 days lower than the global average.
On this leg, carriers announced 14 blanked sailings in July, representing around 5.4% of the total capacity offered.
North America→Asia
In contrast to the headhaul, reliability on the backhaul improved by 3.6 percentage points reaching almost 60%.
Vessels sailing in this direction have shown steady performance improvement since April.
This is also reflected in the average arrival delay of LATE and ALL vessels, as shown below.
Nevertheless, 2024 performance on this leg has not yet recovered to 2023 levels.
Notable arrival delays at key US East Coast Ports
A closer look at individual ports reveals that the arrival delays at US East Coast ports such as New York, Newark, Savanah, and Charleston were between 1.4 and 1.7 days.
In the Gulf port of Houston, seaexplorer analytics recorded arrival delays of 3.4 days.
In contrast, vessels calling West Coast ports such as LA-Long Beach, Oakland, and Vancouver were mostly on time.
On the Asian side, arrival delays at key Chinese ports Ningbo, Shanghai and Qingdao were around 1.3-1.6 days. However, vessels were more than 2 days delayed in Yantian.
Looking forward, the potential impact of ILA strikes at US East Coast and Gulf ports remains a concern.
While the extent of the strikes is unclear, Kuehne+Nagel expects carriers to maintain services or potentially increase services to West Coast ports.
Blank sailings on the Transpacific and Transatlantic are also possible.
