"This goes to show that the most well-connected ports within the global deep-sea trades are also some of the most unreliable. And while this is not entirely the fault of the port, as schedule reliability is largely dictated by the vessel, it is still a relevant metric of port performance," Murphy said.
Sea-Intelligence analysed port performance in terms of schedule reliability, across the 202 deep-sea ports with the largest number of container vessel calls, by creating a sort of "power ranking", based on almost 14 years of data.
It noted that while a straight average across monthly schedule reliability for each port across the 14 years is one approach, it assigns an equal measure of importance to schedule reliability performance in 2012 as it does in 2025.
"In our experience, recent results are more indicative of future performance. As such, to account for recency, we assigned a higher weight to schedule reliability performance in 2025 and lowered the weight as we went down to 2012," the report said, adding that it also accounted for port call volume.
Sea-Intelligence noted that the more port calls in a month, the more chances there are for something to go wrong, which makes maintaining a higher reliability figure that much more difficult.
