News
Schedule reliability has remarkably improved on the Asia-North Europe trade since reaching very low points during the coronavirus pandemic, according to Sea-Intelligence. In particular, the 2M alliance—Mediterranean Shipping Co. (MSC) and Maersk—has made an improvement that is greater than those achieved by the Ocean Alliance, made up of CMA CGM, COSCO Shipping Lines, Evergreen Marine and Orient Overseas Container Line (OOCL), and THE Alliance, consisting of Hapag-Lloyd, Ocean Network Express (ONE), Yang Ming Marine Transport and HMM.
To gauge which of the three carrier alliances recorded the fastest post-pandemic recovery in schedule reliability, Sea-Intelligence has pegged their lowest recorded schedule reliability during the pandemic and then looked at the change in the months that followed.
The 2M alliance has improved its schedule reliability by 20 percentage points, whereas improvements for the Ocean Alliance and THE Alliance have both been under 10 percentage points. By the seventh month, 2M had almost reached a recovery of 50 percentage points, with the other two alliances lagging severely behind. The Ocean Alliance had only got to the 45-percentage point mark by the 17th month, with THE Alliance taking 25 months just to get within a hair of the 50 percentage-point mark. In short, the schedule reliability recovery rate for 2M was far above the other two alliances.
In fact, on the Asia-Europe trade lane, the 2M alliance has seen rapid improvements in schedule reliability after dropping to its lowest point during the pandemic. While it has continued on this trajectory on the Asia-North Europe route, its rate of recovery on the Asia-Mediterranean has slowed down considerably. The Ocean Alliance, on the other hand, while having a relatively slower improvement on the Asia-North Europe trade, have largely been consistent in schedule reliability improvements in the months after its lowest figure of the pandemic. THE Alliance has seen a relatively slower recovery on the Asia-North Europe lane, picking up in recent months, while seeing the opposite trend on the Asia-Mediterranean route.
