The world’s 13 largest container shipping lines significantly improved their schedule reliability in 2023.
On-time performance increased from 42.6% to 62.1% in 2023, an improvement of 19.5 percentage points, according to Sea-Intelligence’s Global Liner Performance report, which measures the ability to arrive on time for the world’s 13 largest container carriers.
However, the improvement only reaches the 2020 level and is still below the 70% to 80% that the container fleet was at in 2012-2019.
Although 2023 ended with a major headache for the global shipping industry with the attacks in the Red Sea, where entire fleets had to be diverted south of the Cape of Good Hope, it did not have a significant impact on the average delay for the year.
However, Sea-Intelligence predicts that the Red Sea crisis will impact on-time performance for the first months of 2024, but it will be temporary as the extra sailing time is already factored into carriers’ schedules.
Maersk is the most timely container shipping company, with a schedule reliability of 67.7% for 2023 compared to 52.2% in 2022.
Taiwan’s Yang Ming is at the bottom of Sea-Intelligence’s report, but the shipping company has also made great progress in 2023, where on-time performance was 50.7%, compared to 32.3% in 2022.
Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd recently announced that from 2025 they will enter into a new alliance called Gemini Cooperation. The two companies will share space on each other’s ships.
At the same time, they aim for the cooperation to give them a 90% right to share space.
They hope to achieve this by having fewer stops on the individual routes, while a larger proportion of the cargo will also go through ports where one of the two shipping companies controls the container terminals.
Translated using DeepL with additional editing by Kristoffer Grønbæk
