The punctuality of container ships has not returned to the levels seen before 2019. This is according to the analysis firm Sea-Intelligence, also in light of the data for March 2026, which closed with an overall positive result. In that month – the best since the start of the year, the analysis firm found – 65.2% of ships arrived on time (+3.9 percentage points on the February value and +5.2 p.p. on March 2025).
According to analysts, while between 2011 and 2019 an average percentage of ships between 70% and 80% reached their destination ports ‘on time’, in the current context this value has settled in a range between 50% and 65%. At the same time, the average delay appears to have worsened: before the pandemic it stood between three and four days, today it is between 4.5 and 5.5 days. Specifically in March, the average delay of container ships reached 5.48 days, down 0.14 days from the February readings (but up 0.36 from March 2025).
Using the share of ships that do not adhere to the schedule and the average duration of this delay, Sea-Intelligence then calculated how large the ‘slice’ of capacity absorbed by this inefficiency is, noting first of all that the value is growing. Historically, analysts observed, delays absorbed cargo space for about 2.2% of global capacity, but in recent phases an additional share of between 2% and 4% has been added to this figure.
What is therefore missing is a capacity that, depending on the period, has reached 4% or 6%, and which at this moment is equal to approximately 5.3% of the total overall container capacity. In TEU, Sea-Intelligence noted, this is an amount equal to 1.8 million, equivalent to what Evergreen, the seventh largest liner in the world by cargo space, can deploy.
