Effects of fruit/Lacking consistency

Tuesday, 14 July 2009

South Africa:

Effects of fruit

THE  time-keeping analysis in this survey is limited to services that operate to a fixed-day rhythm, which means effectively that it is a battle between MSC and the SAECS member lines.

It might be mentioned that the survey window does, as usual, include the peak fruit export season at Cape Town, when the port tends to be congested, and all lines that call there suffered from the knock-on effects – particularly for operations on which the port is called both south- and northbound. It is thus largely a question of which ones manage to get around the problem most effectively.

MSC comes out worst here, although its average of days late at Durban was a slight improvement on last year’s result. MSC’s main strategy for dealing with the problem is to skip the Hamburg call, thereby saving a couple of days, but this alone is sometimes not enough to get back on track.

In contrast, both the SAECS loops that call at Durban registered excellent averages this year. Whereas MSC only allows four calendar days between arrival at Cape Town and arrival at Durban, SAECS has a seven-day difference on its Core loop, and those extra three days provide a sufficient buffer to iron out most delays.

The Intermediate loop fared even better – largely because of the fact that there is no southbound call at Cape Town to cause delays, and also because the round-voyage time is a generous eight weeks. The only problems that were encountered here were berthing delays at Durban in March and April – an obstacle that tends to occur when Durban is busy, but one which does of course affect all operations.
One interesting feature, when comparing this survey to last year’s, is that no sailings were dropped, and no calls at Durban were missed. MSC skipped a couple of Felixstowe calls when replacement vessels were being phased in, but containers could easily have been relayed to meet the mother ships.

This does not affect the recorded transit times for MSC, as these sailings are excluded from the data, but unfortunately for the carrier its policy of making Felixstowe first European loading call does weigh against it in the competition for best transit times from the UK.

The SAECS Core loop provides the fastest times from the UK to Durban, with a scheduled time from Tilbury of 24 days, and it did improve on this a little in the survey snapshot, whereas MSC’s times were slightly longer than scheduled. To Cape Town and Port Elizabeth, the difference is even wider, and the SAECS grouping thus carries off a worthy double for both schedule reliability and transit times from the UK.

It should be noted, however, that the fortnightly Intermediate loop is a little slower – scheduled times from Thamesport to Durban are 29 days, although on the three voyages monitored since the UK call was restored the average was just over 26.

West Africa:

Lacking consistency

THE  Liner Analysis review is once again hampered in its coverage by the lack of fully-containerised services operating to a fixed-day pattern and without transhipment. This has narrowed down the number of operations that could be assessed for schedule reliability to just three (the MOL ARN loop was introduced too late for assessment).

Even here, the lack of a consistent schedule on which to base arrival dates ruled out MSC’s operation from Felixstowe, although it must be said that serious congestion at Tema (mainly in December/January) and at Lagos (for much of the period under review) did cause considerable disruption.

Maersk/Safmarine and Delmas/OTAL appear to have coped quite well, although comparing their respective WAF 6 and Hebdo services is a little pointless, in that the first covers Lagos and the second the other three base ports – Dakar, Abidjan and Tema.

The delays at Lagos did rather spoil the data, as it was unclear if dates recorded referred to arrival or berthing times. This is important, as on many occasions the two differed considerably, as some ships were spending almost three weeks to complete their visits to the port in February  – a figure that had thankfully dropped to just a few days by April.

This effectively left the field open for Delmas/OTAL’s Hebdo operation to take top spot for schedule reliability, although it should be noted that no arrival dates were available for Tema on five voyages. Nevertheless, the result was a huge improvement on last year, and this does help to make the pair worthy winners.

There were rather more figures to review for transit times from the UK, due to the inclusion of direct multi-purpose operations, but once again it was the Delmas/OTAL Hebdo that led the field overall, based on the three base ports that it covers.

MSC had the best times to Tema, but was much less competitive to Lagos and Abidjan due to the port delays mentioned above. The call at Dakar has only just been introduced, so no result was available for this port.

Grimaldi also provided excellent times to Dakar and Lagos, and although Tilbury was omitted on four of the 20 monitored voyages, it did enough to share first position with Delmas/OTAL in the UK transit times category.

But the situation may well have changed by next year, as MOL is now scheduling very fast times indeed from Felixstowe to Abidjan and Lagos/Apapa on its new ARN operation.