On course with the best

Wednesday, 27 February 2008

THE standard of operational performance in the trade from north Europe to the Caribbean and Pacific coasts of South America proved to be impressively high during our assessment period, and average schedule reliability was among the best recorded in this year’s Liner Analysis cycle.

This comment has to be qualified by the fact that relay services are excluded from the performance survey, although for most of these operations the time-keeping of the main leg to their regional hub ports can be used as a rough guideline. A few comments have also been made on the time allowed for meeting connections.

Multi-purpose operations, including the twice-monthly Condor Express and the various weekly reefer backhaul services, have also been omitted from the assessment. However, it might be noted that the latter do tend to stick closely to their fixed-day patterns, due to the high demands and punctuality requirements of the refrigerated trades.

To the Pacific coast, only three direct fully-cellular operations can be taken into account – Maersk Line’s Andean service, and the two EuroAndes loops of CSAV, Hamburg Süd, Hapag-Lloyd and CMA CGM – and all three were worthy competitors.

The EuroAndes ‘A’ loop (operated by Hamburg Süd and Hapag-Lloyd) suffered from one specific problem – its scheduled calls at Buenaventura. The Colombian port has been through a rough time, with congestion reaching such a serious state that carriers resorted to introducing a surcharge for cargo moving to the port last autumn, and this has yet to be lifted.

For liner services, the delays can be seen in the time taken between exiting the Panama Canal and arriving at Buenaventura, which is roughly a day’s sailing time, but was taking up to three calendar days on some weeks. This was the principal cause of delays for the EuroAndes ‘A’ string, and the need to make up time afterwards explains the omission of two southbound calls at Callao.

The situation at Buenaventura has of course also affected relay loops calling at the port – including Evergreen’s PWS, which is currently not being scheduled as a fixed-day operation.

The EuroAndes ‘B’ loop had a slightly better average than the ‘A’ loop, not having the burden of Buenaventura calls, but the Maersk Andean service bettered both, with an almost perfect record of on-day arrivals at San Antonio, its main Pacific coast port of call.

Maersk relays to Callao, so its performance here could not be monitored, although it does allow several days for the connection, and the Andean service was never more than a single calendar day late arriving at the Balboa hub. This also suggests that the relay network as a whole should enjoy a generally high standard of punctuality.

To the Caribbean coast base port of Cartagena, Maersk could not be assessed, as it connects via the Panama rail link from Balboa to Manzanillo. The two EuroAndes loops face competition to Cartagena from several direct services, although one, the Europe Caribbean service, is run by CMA CGM on behalf of the same four partners, and another is run independently by Hamburg Süd.

There was not much to choose between these four operations, with a generally solid performance marred only by the odd lengthier delay, although Hamburg Süd did skip the Cartagena call on four of its monitored sailings. However, this is unlikely to have caused much of a problem for shippers, given the line’s many other routeing options to the Colombian port.

Newly included this year in the Caribbean coast section is Europe West-Indies Lines (EWL), due to its upgrade to a fixed-day weekly schedule. The choice of a six-week itinerary was soon seen to be too tight, and the subsequent extension of the round-voyage time by a week has certainly tightened up performance – the excellent schedule reliability hopefully justifying the cost of the extra ship.

Since the new seven-week schedule was brought in, EWL’s time-keeping at Cartagena has been close to perfect, and enough to lift its average for the whole 20-week monitoring period above the opposition.
This is a rare victory for a small line in this age of shipping giants, but might also be seen as a reward for perseverance by continuing to serve ports such as La Guaira and Santa Marta, to which its rivals have abandoned direct service.

The performance of lines at the Panamanian hubs has not been included as an award category, but the results can be seen in the table. Again, the standard was high, although there were a few notable exceptions.

Thus, Evergreen had one ship (a slower fill-in for one of the regulars) arriving six days late at Colón in July, but also skipped Thamesport on four occasions.

As for the Grand Alliance PAX, the result was awful, although by temporarily adding an extra ship and pushing all the others back a week in the schedule, it was back on track by May. However, the PAX is apparently rarely used to carry containers from north Europe to Panama.

As for transit times, Maersk Line’s Andean service was fastest from the UK to Balboa, while the New World Alliance APX was quickest to Manzanillo – both providing a useful start as a first leg of Maersk and APL/MOL’s relay operations.

From the UK to Cartagena, the picture was clouded by port skipping, but the two EuroAndes loops provided the best times overall, giving all four partners (CSAV, Hamburg Süd, Hapag-Lloyd and CMA CGM) a share in the spoils.

Finally, to the Pacific coast there was only one serious contender to the main Chilean port cluster of Valparaíso /San Antonio – Maersk Line, with its eye-catchingly swift times of just 17 days from Felixstowe to San Antonio.

With the EuroAndes lines pulled back by their ‘wayport’ calls in the Caribbean basin, Maersk can also provide faster relay connections in most cases, and the line fully deserves its Pacific route double.