Dearth of fulfilled schedules

Tuesday, 09 June 2009

THE monitoring period covered by this survey of the trade to China, Hong Kong and Taiwan coincides with a raft of operational changes, and these must be taken into account in assessing the relative performance of the many operations covered.

As noted in Part One, several service loops have been suspended, and in most cases these have not been included in the tables. The exceptions are those that impressed for their punctuality, notably the Cosco-operated CES/CNEU and the “K” Line-operated PAN/PM1 pendulum.

In other cases, operations have been altered to such an extent that the recorded performances are irrelevant. These include three of the operations that have been re-routed via the Cape of Good Hope, although the fourth of these (the Grand Alliance EU3) has been kept in as the changes were not made until the survey window closed.

A couple of loops - the CMA CGM FAL3 and Maersk’s AE2 - do not make any calls at Liner Analysis base ports, and could not be monitored.

 A complication in assessing time-keeping performance on many operations was the tendency for carriers to skip sailings on certain weeks. The monitoring period coincides with the quieter time of the year, and very few operations had a full complement of sailings for the 20-week window. Indeed, it would be quicker to list those that maintained a sailing every week than those that didn’t (the full list of skipped sailings can be found in the footnotes to the table of schedule reliability)!

 MSC deserves credit as both its Silk and Lion services fell into this category. However, the Lion service is one of a couple for which schedules were unclear, and which could thus not be monitored, one problem being the line’s one-off use of the Cape of Good Hope routeing, a voyage on which MSC Lisbon spent a few days at Cape Town.

UASC’s long-term schedules were thrown into disarray by the aborted changes to its network and the eventual return to the old AEC1 pattern.

These problems left 15 operations for which data could be extracted – 11 covering the full period, and four less than the full 20 weeks.

In general terms, the time-keeping performance of these service loops was not bad, and certainly an improvement on recent years, as a result of the reduced incidence of delays in European ports – a silver lining of the trade downturn – and the widespread use of more relaxed schedules due to ‘slow-steaming’.
Only three of these operations gave cause for concern, the worst being the Grand Alliance EU2, which was knocked well off schedule on outbound voyages by severe delays at Jeddah and Jebel Ali – one ship berthing two weeks late at the latter in January/February.

The Grand Alliance EU4 suffered continued delays, but the schedule has now been extended by a week, allowing a couple of days longer for the eastbound trip to Taiwan and northern China.

The third disappointing operation was the AES3/AE3 of “K” Line and Yangming, although this was due mainly to non-stop alterations to the fleet and schedule during its phase-in period. Happily, it now appears to have settled into a fixed pattern, with all but a couple of the ships that have been earmarked to maintain it in place.

Among the other operations, the most impressive of a good crop of results belonged to Maersk Line’s AE10 and the new Evergreen UAE, although these had only been in operation in their current form for eight and five weeks respectively at the end of this survey period.

These are definite contenders for top spot in the Hong Kong/southern China sector, but the incidence of skipped calls leaves Maersk in pole position, bolstered by the excellent performance of the old-style AE10 in the October-December period (which does not appear in the table).

It might be mentioned that the New World Alliance JEX recorded a clean sheet for Yantian, but the grouping’s slightly weaker results for Hong Kong took it out of the reckoning for this sector.
Maersk also takes the crown for central China, based on its result at Shanghai, the 10-week AE1 performance again following a sterling result on the old-style AE10 in the earlier weeks.

To Kaohsiung, Evergreen’s UAE had a 100% record in the five weeks covered here, although its predecessor, the CES, had a rather disrupted schedule in the previous weeks as it was transformed into the new pendulum. It is thus only fair that Hanjin shares the top spot for Taiwan, based on the record of its FEX loop.

As usual, sorting out a Star Performer for transit times from the UK is an onerous task, as the prevalence of multi-loop networks and the frequency of operational changes complicates the picture.

There is one clear winner – the “K” Line/Yangming AES/AE1 operation to central China, as its times from Felixstowe to Shanghai could not be bettered – although the revamped Cosco/Hanjin Loop 2/AEX looks set to run it very close in future.

The New World Alliance AEX pulverised the opposition to Hong Kong, although again Cosco/Hanjin are now scheduling even faster times. Yet if the times of the New World Alliance’s AEX and SCX loops are combined, it is beaten by Evergreen’s UAE – as this also provided the best times to the Shenzhen ports during its five monitored weeks, it should share the laurels with the grouping in the Hong Kong/Southern China sector.

To Taiwan, there were plenty of operations with competitive transit times – the Grand Alliance EU4, Evergreen CEM and New World Alliance AEX among them. However, the fastest of them all was the “K” Line/Yangming AES/AE1.