Tag Archives: ocean shipping

Vessel schedule reliability lowest on record

Posted on January 28, 2022 by | Leave a comment

The nice graphs here show that ocean carrier schedule reliability is extremely low, hovering between 30 and 40%.

Source: Sea-Intelligence, via Port Technology International

The COVID years of 2020 and 2021 have seen a remarkable drop from the 70% to 80% reliability of 2018 and 2019. Is COVID likely the culprit? To some extent the disruption it triggered caused order fluctuation that the ocean carriers with their very large ships were not prepared for. The ensuing port congestion coupled with the practice of blanking sailings of the very large ships when they were not nearly full caused the drop.

I don’t see how a service with a 30% to 40% reliability can maintain itself. The ocean carriers say that back to normal demand will fix the problem, but the fact is that demand for instance from Asia to the West Coast US is actually still below peaks of 2019. So normal demand would be higher, not lower.

Vessel schedule reliability lowest on record 27 January 2022 Port Technology International Team

Vessel schedule reliability lowest on record – Port Technology International
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New teu waiting days indicator highlights the severity of global container congestion

Posted on January 20, 2022 by | 1 comment

Kuehne + Nagel has developed a new measure of container congestion. Its digital platform seaexplorer now features the Global Disruption Index.

The index seems to total the cumulative TEU waiting time in days, based on container ship capacity in certain disrupted hot spots. Many US ports are included in the index. some Chinese and Korean ports and European ports are also included.

The graph below is an example of the information available. It clearly shows the rise in the index from 1- December to 19-January. North American ports are also clearly the largest contributors; however it is not clear from the article whether more ports from the US and North America are included in the analysis. The patterns are clearly similar.

Source: Graph from seaexplorer via Daily Splash article.

Now quite a few marine reporting services have developed congestion measures.

Is there a best one? I have not seen a study comparing the indices as to accuracy or the ability to provide insight.

For instance this Bloomberg article talks about another one, from RBC Capital Markets.

And this article from the Washington Post gives a good picture of the problems in the US.

Splash247 has also reported on the index created by the New York Federal Reserve here.

But the congestion cannot be denied. How to measure it and how to fix it are the questions to answer, for we get what we measure.

Sam Chambers January 20, 2022

New teu waiting days indicator highlights the severity of global container congestion – Splash247
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US importers using box ships to store cargo

Posted on January 13, 2022 by | 1 comment

US importers are not so worried about cargo waiting offshore to be unloaded. As long as they have enough for their sales or manufacturing, the cargo can sit on a container ship and the principal cost to the shipper is the interest cost. With interest rates at historic lows, that isn’t much.

The graph below from project44, a Chicago, I- based visibility platform, shows the number of TEUs at anchor by month from January through November 2020, on the left. The rise starting in August is significant. Using data from HSBC, which show a 3.2% annual interest rate, using an average container value of $40,000, they calculate almost $50M per month in new delay costs, and cumulative inventory interest costs over $850 million.

The point is that these costs are a lot lower than inventory costs at warehouses. While the cargo is held at sea under riskier conditions, in the warehouse other costs kick in, not the least of which is space required. Insurance charges on the financed inventory also accumulate. And there’s the work, both labor and mechanical, of shuffling the inventory around; it’s very variable given the specific warehouse layout, but can be significant also.

So shippers are using the offshore jam-up rather than wishing it away. Only when the demand for products ratchets up so that the offshore inventory is needed will the stakes change. While we have significant COVID likelihood today, that isn’t likely to change much.

It’s always interesting to look at the overall question of inventory cost in the supply chain. Advantages to shippers can come from unlikely places.

By Nick Savvides 12/01/2022

US importers using box ships to store cargo – cheaper than warehouses – The Loadstar
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Posted in Logistics, Managerial Econ, Shipping, Supply Chains

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