An analysis by data provider Sea Intelligence concluded that importers in North America are more likely to experience shipment delays than their counterparts in Europe. This analysis was based on the global schedule reliability data from 2011 to 2022 and took into consideration several factors on multiple trade lanes. Sea Intelligence found that the performance for European importers was above that for North American performers for most of the studied period. The largest discrepancy appeared in early 2015 when reliability was almost 20% higher for Europe than North America. According to the analysts, the reason was the port labour dispute on the US West Coast, which caused significant container handling delays. At that time, there was no disruption at all in Europe, says Sea Intelligence. In addition, the analysis highlighted that the percentage of trade for each lane is different for each continent, which plays a role in the level of reliability. For example, the volume of cargo transported between Asia and North Europe is not necessarily equal to the volume transported between Asia and North America. Thus, the reliability on one lane for North America could be different than that for Europe. Nevertheless, schedule reliability in general from main export regions remained higher for European importers, and not only during the pandemic years. “The data is very clear. North American importers need to account for a significantly higher degree of unreliability in their supply chains, as compared to the European importers,” concluded the report. “It is also clear that this is not a pandemic effect – this is a phenomenon which has been prevalent for more than a decade, and also a phenomenon which worsened for the North American importers already in 2017-2018 and has remained low ever since.”