Major bottlenecks in the containerised supply chain around the world have pushed container line schedule reliability to its lowest level yet, and there are few signs of any rapid improvement.

The latest figures from Sea-Intelligence’s global container line performance database show that just 34.3% of vessels arrived within one day of their scheduled arrival time in September. The average delay across the global fleet was more than a week.

“This means that September effectively saw the removal of 12% of all global vessel capacity from the market due to the delays,” said Sea-Intelligence chief executive Alan Murphy. “One way to look at it is to say that this is the same as the global fleet suddenly losing a carrier the size of CMA CGM or Cosco.

“Another way to look at it, would be to say that this is same as not having any vessels delivered into the fleet since the beginning of 2018 but still expecting that stagnating fleet to carry today’s global volumes.”

While the focus has been on the large number of ships waiting for a berth off the US west coast ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles, where 75 boxships were at anchor or drifting as of Friday, the problems go much wider.

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