Container shipping grows in reliability compared to the beginning of the year

Whereas at the beginning of the year less than one in three ships arrived on time, we see a sharp improvement in August. Reliability has increased to almost 50%. The Danish company Sea-Intelligence tracks worldwide the extent to which container ships reach their ports of destination according to original sailing schedules. In August, this was the case with 46.2% of all ships. This was 5.8% more than in July.

Punctuality increased for four consecutive months and is the strongest increase so far this year. The average delay decreased sharply, by more than half a day to about 6 days. In January, the average delay was still about 8 days. The number of vessels forced to wait for handling due to congestion in the ports was still relatively high at almost 8% in August. At its lowest point, in January this year, it was almost 14%. In a normal market, about 2% of the fleet is temporarily unavailable due to congestion. The declining punctuality figures reflect rapidly decreasing congestion at seaports. According to Sea-Intelligence, congestion has now halved from its peak level at the beginning of the year. ‘This suggests that the container market will have normalized again in the first quarter of next year.