As a leader in sea logistics, Kuehne+Nagel closely tracks and collects data on the movement of vessels, including actual arrivals and vessel delays. A summary of this analysis based on neutral data is published monthly in our Schedule Reliability Report, available on Sea News.
Executive Summary
Overall on-time performance rebounded after months of decline, increasing by 5.2 percentage points month-on-month to 51.2% in March.
Service adjustments due to the Red Sea situation are largely in place, contributing to the improvement.
Although the development is positive, March's performance remains considerably below 2023 levels.
Trades impacted by Red Sea diversions showed the strongest improvement. In particular, Asia<-> Mediterranean/Black Sea and Asia <-> North Europe recorded the highest percentage increases.
Of the North American trades, the Transpacific on-time performance climbed to more than 55%, a 28% month-on-month improvement.
Global On-Time Performance
As shown in the figure below, global on-time performance rose above 50% last month, improving by 5.2 percentage points compared to February.
A year-on-year comparison shows a 16-percentage point difference between March 2023 and March 2024.
As illustrated by the comparison below, March’s improvement was inadequate to restore reliability to 2023 levels.
Although overall performance improved in March, the average arrival delay of LATE vessels increased slightly to 4.1 days.
As shown in the figure below, the delay was higher this March compared to March 2023.
In January and February, the delays remained below those for the same months in 2023.
For ALL vessels, the global average arrival delay was 1.9 days in March. In contrast to LATE vessels, this is a 0.1-day improvement month-on-month.
On a year-on-year comparison, the delay is 0.7 days higher than March 2023. This is another indication that schedule reliability has not yet recovered to 2023 levels.
Reliability per Trade
Several trades improved their on-time performance in March.
Notably, those most affected in January and February by the Red Sea situation showed strong gains.
For example, Asia<->Mediterranean/Black Sea improved its reliability by 40% in March to 41.3%. This was the largest upswing among the eleven trades.
Similarly, reliability for Asia<->North Europe gained 11.5 percentage points, reaching 46.7% in March.
For the North American trades, the Transpacific improved by more than 12 percentage points to 55.9%.
In contrast, the Transatlantic declined in reliability by 2.5 percentage points to 51.9% after two months of improvement,
The impact of the Baltimore closure was limited since only a few services called the port.
Reliability on Asia <-> North America
We will take a closer look at the Transpacific trade, given its notable recovery in March.
As shown in the figure below, the performance of the eastbound leg improved by 13.6 percentage points to 47.3% in March.
This is just 2.2 percentage points below the on-time performance in March last year.
In addition, the arrival delay of LATE ships was 0.1 days higher than in February, averaging 3.9 days.
For ALL vessels, the average arrival delay was 2.0 days, 0.4 days lower than in February.
Blank sailing data covering weeks 10 to 13 recorded 20 void sailings on transpacific eastbound. This translates to 10.31% of overall capacity.
On the westbound leg, reliability improved by 10.1 percentage points, reaching nearly 60% in March (Figure 7).
Like the eastbound leg, the year-on-year performance in March was marginally below that of the previous year.
The figure also indicates that the performance improvement seen in February 2022 and 2023 was delayed in March 2024. This may be attributed to the Chinese New Year holidays, which took place earlier in the previous two years.
The average arrival delay for LATE vessels on the westbound leg decreased by 0.4 days month-on-month to 3.4 days last month.
Similarly, the average arrival delay of ALL vessels dropped by 0.5 days to 1.3 days in March for this leg.
Methodology
Calculating the on-time performance
To calculate the on-time performance of a service, Kuehne+Nagel uses vessel schedules from carrier(s) offering that service. Only carrier schedules that match our quality criteria are used for the schedule reliability calculation.
As carriers update schedules constantly, they become more accurate the closer vessels get to a destination port. For this reason, we have implemented a "schedule freeze period" of 14 days prior to actual vessel arrival. In other words, we benchmark the actual arrival with what carriers last announced 14 days earlier. To identify the actual time of arrival, Kuehne+Nagel consumes AIS (Automatic Identification System) vessel data. All vessels which arrive within a +/- 24-hour window at the port of destination compared to the last announced arrival are considered to be on time.
Assigning carrier services to multiple trade lanes
Many services operate on various trade lanes (e.g. a carrier service between Asia and North Europe also calls ports in the Middle East and or the Mediterranean), and therefore carrier services may be listed in multiple trade lanes.
Definition of trade lanes
There is no common standard for the definition of trade lanes. This means, depending on the source, you will find different trade lanes as well as different regions, countries and ports assigned to a trade lane. Kuehne+Nagel has defined its own way of mapping and has assigned ports to these trade lanes accordingly. On-time performances of vessels are captured in our reports on defined main trades, meaning trades moving large container volumes on vessels. Therefore, niche trades and services within one trade, called "Intra Trade "services (e.g. Intra-Asia, Intra-Europe) are currently out of scope.
