Global shipping schedule reliability in May continued to be lower compared to last year as ocean disruptions continued to impact the supply chain.
Sea-Intelligence said in its latest report that May's performance, albeit down -11.0 percentage points year-on-year (YoY), improved by 3.8 percentage points month-on-month (M/M) — to the highest point YTD of 55.8%.
"This is a trend that we also see across the trade lanes, as 29 trade lanes were down Y/Y," said Alan Murphy, chief executive at the Danish maritime analysis firm.
"Of the five that did record an improvement, Asia to North America West Coast (NAWC) recorded the most substantial improvement," he added.
[Source: Sea-Intelligence]
Sea-Intelligence noted that Figure 1 (above) shows the development in schedule reliability for the NAWC trade lane, not only on a monthly level for 2024 but also the average full-year reliability in 2019-2023.
Additionally, Figure 1 also shows the performance for Asia to North America East Coast (NAEC), as commercially, these two trade lanes are closely tied to each other.
"While the Asia-NAWC trade lane has improved substantially and is even approaching — but not quite reaching — the pre-pandemic average performance, the Asia-NAEC trade lane shows no such similar improvement," Murphy said.
He noted that the performance gap between the two trade lanes, which began to open up in 2023, has only been worsening.
"This means that North American importers who use an East Coast routing are increasingly struggling with much larger disruptions in the supply chain than if they had routed cargo via the West Coast," the Sea-Intelligence chief said.
The report found that of the trade lanes that have performed poorly in May 2024, Asia-Middle East has seen one of the largest Y/Y declines.
Compared to the 2019 full-year average, the trade lane has seen the largest decline in schedule reliability, dropping below the pandemic lowest.
"This suggests that the Red Sea crisis is indeed having a strong impact on schedule reliability in the region," Murphy said.