Clutch of three shines through

Wednesday, 10 December 2008

THE performance of carriers in the North Atlantic trade has again been very variable, but at least the range of results has been narrower, with the awful timekeeping of last year’s worst performers on the ‘main range’ route thankfully not repeated during the 20-week monitoring period used for this survey.

One of those operations has been terminated, while the other – the joint service of Cosco, “K” Line, Yangming and Hanjin – has improved greatly, thanks largely to the removal of the Felixstowe call in August last year. Ships were still a week late on four monitored voyages, but by cutting a few calls (including two each at New York and Norfolk) all ships were back on schedule by July.

This improvement left the Grand Alliance PAX loop at the bottom of the schedule reliability table. The grouping did slip an extra ship in for one sailing in the winter, giving the others an extra week to catch up, and this did improve matters for a while, but they were slipping off schedule again by August.

The Grand Alliance had more success with the ATX loop, which turned in a much better result than last year. One ship was badly delayed in Europe in the spring, leaving Southampton five days late, but otherwise this was a reasonable performance by the Grand Alliance and Zim, its new operating partner on the ATX.

A similar level of punctuality was displayed by the Hamburg Süd Trident service at Philadelphia, with most ships on time, but arriving at least three days late on four of the 19 monitored sailings, and there was no sailing during one of the 20 weeks. Two Tilbury calls were skipped, but this was due to new ships being phased into service.

Both MSC and Evergreen omitted the UK calls on their respective services on five occasions to help ships keep to schedule, but neither was particularly impressive in the timekeeping area. Evergreen is apparently taking steps to trim its schedule, with a couple of calls removed – including Thamesport – and this should be beneficial.

ACL turned in a comparable performance. Although suffering as most lines on the Atlantic do from delays in the winter months, ACL prefers to let the ships gradually make up the lost time over a couple of voyages rather than axe port calls, and all were indeed back on schedule by the summer.
The gulf between the majority of main range operations and the top three in the table is remarkable, particularly as the same three were in exactly this situation last year.

In third spot this time is Independent Container Line (ICL), whose overall average was spoilt by boiler problems on the Independent Venture, which had to be taken out of service for a few days for repairs, The following ship took the former vessel’s schedule position, not surprisingly, arriving in the US three days late.

This allowed the New World Alliance and Maersk to shake off ICL’s challenge and grab the two top places in the schedule reliability ranking for their respective APX and TA3 operations. There was just a whisker in it, but the New World Alliance lines (APL, MOL and HMM) were once again able to claim the crown.

However, it must be noted that Felixstowe was not called on every voyage by either, with one call omitted on the APX and no less than five on the TA3 – the omissions being made to help keep the ships on time.
This does not affect Liner Analysis schedule reliability results, but does mean that the actual transit times given in the relevant table should be treated with caution. Thus, while the APX was clearly the fastest from the UK to both US base ports, the ATX loop of the Grand Alliance and Zim was very close behind.
From the UK to the Canadian main range port of Halifax, ACL is still the easy winner in a race that has been whittled down in the past year from four to two.

Unfortunately, it is not possible to provide independent assessment of performance to Montreal, and while lines’ own data is available in most cases, this cannot be used as the basis for awards under Liner Analysis rules.

This is hard on Maersk Line, whose TA4 operation is quite clearly the most punctual of the five in contention, with Maersk’s own dates indicating an average days behind schedule at Montreal of just 0.15 days.

Arrival dates for MSC’s Montreal Express were not available, but the grounding of MSC Sabrina in the St  Lawrence during a heavy snowstorm in March would rule it out of the reckoning, as the four-week delay meant that this vessel was unable to perform its next scheduled voyage.

However, a glance at departure dates from Liverpool reveals that timekeeping on the Montreal Express has generally improved following the switch from a three-week to a four-week rotation.
In the three-pronged network of the St Lawrence Co-ordinated Service (SLCS) of Hapag-Lloyd and OOCL, Loop 3 was clearly the best performer – Hapag-Lloyd arrival dates suggest an overall average of just over 0.5 calendar days.

In contrast, Loops 1 and 2 have had a distinctly rough time. Normally, lines on the St Lawrence get pushed off schedule in the difficult winter months, often skipping a week’s sailing to recover the fixed-day schedule, but tend to be more or less back on track by the late spring.

However, this year ships have remained behind schedule on both loops, and the slippage has been such that the partners have had to skip a summer sailing to get back into the normal fixed-day pattern. Thus a week was missed in July on Loop 2, and in August on Loop 1.

This is despite the omission of the Southampton call on seven of the 20 monitored voyages on Loop 1 (although on one week, a Loop 2 vessel was diverted to call there).

Actual transit times on the St Lawrence route are not available, but on paper, MSC has a slight edge over the two SLCS loops that include a UK call.