Drewry: Containership on-time arrivals below 50%

Drewry: Containership on-time arrivals below 50% If it’s Tuesday, this must be Belgium. Remember that film title from 1969? Apparently it doesn’t work like that in the shipping business.
   On-time arrivals for containerships and multipurpose liner vessels fell well below 50 percent in the first quarter of 2007, said Drewry Shipping Consultants' Container Shipper Insight, in its latest survey of global carrier schedule reliability.
   The London-based consultants said its latest survey of global carrier reliability reported only 46 percent on-time arrivals in the latest quarter, compared to 57 percent in the first two months of 2006.
   The firm said liner schedule reliability was at its lowest on the 20 trade routes it tracks since it began analysis in late 2005.
   The proportion of vessels arriving one calendar day late was 23 percent during the quarter. The proportion of vessels making it two or more days late was another 29 percent.
   About 1 percent of containerships arrived two days before the scheduled arrival day, which Drewry also considered not to be “on time.”
   Drewry’s survey tracked 2,144 arrivals of containerships and multipurpose liner vessels operated by more than 60 carriers worldwide in about 200 services. The survey calculated schedule reliability by service, by trade route, by carrier and globally for the latest quarter.
   “Unless something is done, shippers will have to build more buffer time in their supply chains to deal with the damaging risk of variability in liner schedules, particularly on some trade routes,” said Philip Damas, lead researcher on the Drewry Container Shipper Insight.
   Drewry believes that the deterioration of liner schedule reliability was due partly to port congestion, notably in the port of Rotterdam, where Drewry recorded on-time arrivals for only 35 percent in the first quarter. Delays in the port have had a knock-on effect on the schedule of subsequent ports of call.
   Furthermore, factors such as the unwillingness of carriers to speed up vessels to make up for lost time (due to high bunker prices) and schedule disruptions linked to changes of vessels between services are believed to have aggravated the situation. Another factor is that shipping lines include many ports in a single vessel rotation, including intermediate wayports under the practice of “double dipping.”
   “It seems paradoxical that, as an industry, container shipping is now largely unable to meet the fixed schedules which were said to differentiate liner shipping and tramp shipping,” Damas added.