With congestion finally easing on the US west coast, container service reliability is on the up, with the three major east-west trade lanes reporting a significant jump in their on-time performance for April.


According to the latest study from Drewry Supply Chain Advisors, as part of its Carrier Performance Insight, the aggregate on-time performance of services operating Asia-Europe, transpacific and transatlantic routes climbed to 67.6% last month, up 4.1 percentage points over the previous month.

The figure represented a new high for Drewry’s new data series that commenced in May 2014, surpassing the 64.3% reliability achieved by carriers on the three trades in October of last year. In the months before April, congestion on the US west coast reached unprecedented levels while at the same time the industry was struggling to cope with the implementation of new alliances and partnerships.

At its peak in January, carrier reliability on the transpacific, transatlantic and Asia-Europe trades fell to lower than 40%, 50% and 60% respectively.

On the transpacific and Asia-Europe trades on-time performance has improved markedly over the past few months, with the former reporting its third successive month of improvements.

Meanwhile, reliability on the transatlantic trade continued to decline up until last month, bucking a trend that included six months of consecutive declines, as uncertainties surrounding alliances operating the route continued to play havoc with vessel scheduling.

In April, indicative of the return to "normal" operations on the US west coast, the transpacific trade saw the biggest improvement, according to Drewry, with on-time reliability up 15.1 percentage points to 54%. However, it would seem that we are not out of the woods just yet as reliability on the trade is still some 20 percentage points down on levels seen in June and July of last year.

Senior manager of supply chain research at Drewry Simon Heaney said that it expected the upturn in reliability following the end of what were “exceptional circumstances”.

“We expect further improvements in the next few months, but as on-time performances are approaching the historical ceilings, they might only be marginal,” he added.

Meanwhile, in terms of individual carrier reliability, it was Maersk Line that once again held on to the top spot in Drewry’s rankings, posting an 85% performance rating, followed by OOCL with 77% reliability and MOL and NYK both on 74%.
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