One of the better trades

Wednesday, 26 November 2008

THE small number of competitors in the trade from north Europe to the Caribbean and Pacific coasts of South America has not led to any laxity in performance standards, and once again this has turned out to be one of the best of the trades monitored in the Liner Analysis surveys.

Having said that, there has been a slight deterioration in schedule reliability, with several services recording a higher average of days late than last year at our selected base ports in both sectors of the Andean trade.

It must be pointed out that once again relay and multi-purpose services have not been assessed – the former because of the difficulty in monitoring the exact connections with accuracy, and the second as they do not run to fixed-day schedules.

In the case of relay services, the performance of lines at the main Panamanian hubs can be used as an indicator, and consequently these are included as base ports in the table. However, this is not included as an award category, as it does not strictly fall within the Andean region.

For the record, the most impressive operations here were those of Maersk Line, the New World Alliance and the EuroAndes grouping, with little to choose between them. Yet it might be noted that MIT was skipped six times by Maersk on its Andean loop in our survey window (although boxes could easily have been railed back from Balboa), and once by the New World Alliance.

Most disappointing here were the Grand Alliance lines, which have yet to get to grips with time-keeping on the PAX operation, and the CMA CGM/Marfret/ANL pendulum, which was hit by the need to take one ship out for repairs, with the following vessel speeded up to take its place, but lagging well behind the fortnightly pro forma.

Direct services to our Caribbean base port of Cartagena have been reduced by the disappearance of EWL and the remodeling of Hamburg Süd’s Trident service, and now it is a straight fight between three operations shared by the same lines in the EuroAndes and Europe Caribbean Service groupings.
To their credit, the three loops all performed very well, particularly the one operated by CSAV ships, which had very few blemishes, the only one worth mentioning being the omission of Tilbury on one sailing in February when a ship was running late.

The longer EuroAndes loop, operated by Hamburg Süd and Hapag-Lloyd, was inevitably affected by delays at Buenaventura, and with ships pushed behind schedule in the earlier part of the survey period, the Cartagena call was omitted twice. However, since dropping Buenaventura from the rotation, this loop has been almost perfect.

In the circumstances, there can be absolutely no argument against awarding the four EuroAndes lines the top spot for schedule reliability to the Caribbean coast. As the network was devised by all four partners, they share the award despite the operational responsibility being divided.

The four also provided the best direct transit times, although on paper, the relay services of Maersk and APL/MOL provide some very close competition to Cartagena and to the other ports served in the region, with the possible exception of Puerto Cabello, which is called on one EuroAndes loop.

In the case of the Pacific coast, the EuroAndes lines find themselves in an equally advantageous position to Callao, where their only competition is from relay services that could not be monitored. Yet to Callao, despite the hold-ups experienced by lines at the port, they still put in a commendable performance.
The Pacific coast result is also based on time-keeping at Valparaíso and neighbouring San Antonio, and here the EuroAndes lines had a definite edge over Maersk Line, which until recently provided the only other direct, fixed-day operation.

The Maersk Andean operation was disrupted by a two-week strike at San Antonio in the first half of June, which led to one ship having to handle all Chilean cargo at Lirquen instead, spending nine days in the port.

This aside, Maersk also lost points for making a diversion to call at Arica and Iquique prior to San Antonio on several southbound voyages.

Maersk certainly made up for this with its amazingly fast transit times from the UK to San Antonio, and while scheduled times have now been lengthened by four days through an additional week being added to the round voyage, it is still in pole position.

Maersk’s quick times to Balboa also help its relay operations, with the scheduled times to Guayaquil (18 days), Arica (21) and Iquique (22) particularly impressive. All through times include a built-in buffer time at Balboa, as well, ranging from two to seven days, which minimizes the risk of missed connections.

Finally, the new MSC service between Antwerp and Chile was introduced too late to be included in the data, and while scheduled times could not be given either, as the service had yet to settle into a fixed-day pattern at the time of compiling this review, times from Antwerp are likely to be on the fast side.