Carriers’ Service Reliability at Six-Month High in May

Ocean carriers achieved a six-month high for liner service reliability in May, according to data provided by Drewry’s Carrier Performance Insight.

The most reliable carrier in May was Hong Kong-based Orient Overseas Container Line (OOCL), which had an on-time average of 81.1%, very closely followed by Taiwan’s shipping company Wan Hai with 81.01% and Evergreen with 80.3%.

The on-time average of 76.0% for the 10 trades covered was a 4.1 point improvement on April, representing the third straight month-on-month rise.

Along with the better on-time performance, there was also an improvement for the average deviation from the expected arrival at port, which came down from 0.9 days in April to 0.8 days in May, the lowest it has been since December 2015.

Eight of the ten routes covered recorded month-on-month increases in May, the exceptions being Asia-Africa, down by 11.9 points to 772.5%, and Asia-South America that dropped by 1.5 points to 75.7%, Drewry said.

The biggest improvement was seen in the Transpacific, which rose by 9.8 points to 76.3%, the best since September of last year.

A further sign of the universal attempt by carriers to improve reliability was the fact that the spread between the most and least reliable carrier was below 11 points as all lines scored above 70%.

“Service reliability is on a steadily improving path and is close to the heights reached in the second-half of 2015. We expect the trend to continue through the next few months as carriers put reliability close to the top of their marketing,” said Simon Heaney, senior manager of supply chain research at Drewry.

The ten trades include Asia-Europe, Transatlantic, Asia-Africa, Asia-South America, Transpacific, Asia-South Asia, Europe-Middle East, Asia-Oceania, Asia-Middle East, and Europe-South America.