The new Gemini Cooperation agreement will take effect in February 2025. The two major shipping companies have made bold promises to aim for a schedule reliability of over 90%. The global schedule reliability across all container shipping lines is currently around 50%, according to Kuehne+Nagel's data.

To achieve this promise, they will implement a hub-and-spoke network based on 14 hubs selected for their productivity and dependability and owned by one of the carriers. This operation model is supposed to reduce friction and costs. 

Sea-Intelligence's recent analysis concluded that achieving over 90% reliability is theoretically possible but challenging. However, any prediction is difficult. The main caveat is that there has never been a Gemini Cooperation, and Hapag-Lloyd and Maersk have never been part of a joint alliance. Therefore, there isn’t any available data, and as such, Sea-Intelligence could only do such an analysis by watching patterns of historical behaviour. 

Historical reliability evolution 

Looking at historical data, it becomes clear that only two alliances crossed the 90% reliability mark: the “old” CKYHE alliance (one month in 2015 and three months in 2016) and the 2M Alliance consisting of Maersk and MSC (two months in 2016 and four months in 2019). 

This shows that an alliance can exceed 90% schedule reliability; nevertheless, it has happened only a few times. 

Evolution of the two companies’ reliability 

Shifting the focus to the two future partners, Sea-Intelligence says their schedule reliability is between 50% and 60%. 

Furthermore, their reliability has a similar historical evolution, from 70-75% for Hapag Lloyd and 85-90%for Maersk from January 2012 to January 2020.  

However, reliability dropped significantly during the pandemic and after January 2020, with Hapag falling from 80% to 35% and Maersk from 80% to 45%.    

In the two years after 2020, schedule reliability gradually increased, but it dropped again in spring 2021 (Hapag-Lloyd shows worse performances than Maersk). After that, the Sea-Intelligence reliability index rose until the beginning of the Red Sea Crisis.

Notably, schedule reliability for either company had never exceeded 90% in ten years, even before the Pandemic. Moreover, the two companies' combined reliability in the past four years has never been more than or equal to 90%.  

For that reason, reliability of more than 90% is challenging. Observing whether the two major shipping companies will achieve that will be interesting.