The impact of congestion on containership availability is improving rapidly, with capacity now half-way back to its normal state. Data from Sea-Intelligence shows that global schedule reliability improved to 46.2% in August. At its worst, in January, only 30.4% of ships were arriving within a day of the scheduled arrival date. “This brings the global market performance back to the level seen in December 2020, and hence reflects the best state of affairs in 20 months,” said Sea-Intelligence chief executive Alan Murphy. “Certainly not a stellar performance, but indeed a very clear improvement compared to the abysmal situation which haunted the markets in 2021/2022.”

A direct consequence of fewer delays was more capacity being freed up to the market. “We are now at a point where 7.9% of the global fleet was unavailable in August 2022 due to supply chain delays, down from 9.6% in July, and down from a peak of 13.8% in January 2022,” he said. If a 2% baseline was allowed for “normal” delays in networks, the amount of capacity absorbed by congestion was only 5.9%. “This means, in a very real sense, that the congestion issues have been cut in half, compared to the situation in January 2022,” he said. “This is of course good news for shippers and is also a major factor in the current rapid decline in freight rates. The significant injection of released capacity has led to a situation, where the physical shortage of capacity, which drove the freight rates up, is no longer an issue in most trades.”

Moreover, the pace of recovery in schedules and the easing of congestion indicated that a more normal level of service could be expected early next year. “The data clearly shows that the market has now resolved literally half of the congestion problem, when comparing the peak of problems in January to the normal baseline of operations. Barring any new curveballs, this also implies that the market could be fully normalized during the first quarter of 2023. But the main wildcards here are of course the continuing strike actions in Europe, as well as the absence of a resolution for a new union contract on the US west coast.”

While shippers will welcome a return to more reliable services, the release of additional capacity into the market will provide challenges for carriers, which have seen spot freight rates tumble over recent weeks, and even long-term rates starting to fall from their historic highs. According to Sea-Intelligence figures, carriers have already blanked 48 sailings that were due in October. But despite this, services on the transpacific will still comprise over 1.5m teu of capacity, almost exactly the same as in October 2021, when demand was at a peak. “Anecdotal evidence in the market presently clearly points to weak demand conditions compared to last year,” said Mr Murphy. “This in turn also means that the many blank sailings seen so far are likely insufficient to stem the rate decline in October. For that to happen, we would need to see substantially more blank sailings.”