The major service disruptions due to the round-of-Africa routing have resulted in modest capacity change, according to a new Sea-Intelligence analysis.
The Danish maritime data analysis firm said looking at the differences in offered capacity between the immediate pre-crisis and the present situation — the Red Sea disruptions have only caused a marginal decline in offered capacity.
[Source: Sea-Intelligence]
Sea-Intelligence said Figure 1 shows, for each of the four major East/West trades out of Asia, the cumulative change in offered capacity over the fill period from mid-December to the present date — to show "more cleanly" the impact of the Red Sea issue.
"The interesting element here is that the largest capacity contraction, compared to planned deployment in mid-December, has been seen on the Transpacific trade, with the Asia-North America East Coast trade lane down -7.5% and the Asia-North America West Coast trade lane down -6.9%," Sea-Intelligence said.
Conversely, the report added that the capacity impact on the Asia-North Europe trade lane has been a contraction of -4.9% and on the Asia-Mediterranean trade lane, of only -1.4%.
"What this shows is that despite the extreme upheaval in the vessel schedules, the capacity offered from Asia to Europe has only been reduced quite marginally because of the Red Sea crisis," said Alan Murphy, CEO of Sea-Intelligence.
He added that the capacity reduction here measured is not measured year-on-year (Y/Y), but of the planned schedules in mid-December versus what has materialised until now.
"Curiously, as shown in Figure 1, the impact on the Transpacific is larger, and it is particularly interesting to see the capacity drawdown on the Asia-North America West Coast," Murphy added.
Sea-Intelligence noted that the report did not include future capacity as this would overlap with Chinese New Year effects.
