Drewry: Container Service Reliability Falls

Containership reliability took a small step backwards in October as the average on-time performance across all trades reached 77.9%, according to Carrier Performance Insight, the online schedule reliability tool provided by Drewry Supply Chain Advisors.

The latest result is based on reliability across 10 deep-sea container trades, instead of the three East-West trades as was previously measured up to and including September 2015, when the aggregate on-time result was 79.9%.

The expanded coverage is part of an upgrade to Drewry’s Carrier Performance Insight, which now covers 69 ports and 809 port pairs, and also includes new functionality to download data from the monthly release in both Excel and PDF formats.


The on-time result for the East-West trades came in at 77.3% in October, while our first aggregate result for the seven North-South routes was slightly better at 79.1%.

In the East-West category, October saw worse performances in the Transpacific, which declined by 3.5 percentage points against September to 75.1%, while in the Asia-Europe trade reliability dropped by 3.0 points to 78.2%. On the plus side, reliability on the Transatlantic rose by 12 points in October to a series-high of 84.0%.

The most punctual of the “North-South” trades in October was the Asia-South Asia route with an on-time performance of 87.8%, while the tardiest was the Asia-Africa route that saw only 68.4% of voyages arrive as scheduled.

“Delays in transiting the Panama Canal may have hindered reliability of Transpacific all-water services between Asia and the US East Coast, while in Asia-Europe the suspension of a couple of services and blank voyages will not have aided smooth operations,” said Simon Heaney, senior manager of supply chain research at Drewry.

“We expected to see a decline in reliability as the container industry enters the slack fourth quarter, but it is encouraging to see that it was only marginal,” added Heaney. “It is also welcome news that reliability appears to be of equal standards in both the East-West and North-South routes.  We expect the slowing reliability trend to continue through to the early months of next year, but it will remain above historical performances.”

Two carriers shared the top of the carrier reliability rankings in October with K Line and Evergreen of the CKYH Alliance both scoring on-time performances of 85.7%. At the bottom of the pile were MSC who recorded an average of 52.4% in the month. The trend towards more carriers improving their reliability was once again evident as 16 of the 19 carriers tracked scored at least 75% in October.

Building on Drewry’s long established schedule reliability benchmarking that started back in 2005, the new Carrier Performance Insight provides the ability to benchmark the reliability performance of container carriers on a port-to-port, trade lane, service and industry-wide basis. This information is available via a user-friendly website powered by data from global shipment management software solutions provider CargoSmart.