Normalisation on the seas within sight?
The Copenhagen-based maritime consultancy Sea-Intelligence has analysed the emerging endemic Covid period and, since there is no historical precedent fully describing this situation, compared it to the period of the US West Coast labour dispute of early 2015, which led to major delays and bottlenecks.
Alan Murphy, CEO of Sea-Intelligence, explains: "The system (of schedule reliability) is so far out of balance. However, one element can be used to create a realistic baseline. (...) We define the period from August 2011 to July 2014 as the pre-labour dispute period and calculate the average baseline reliability on Asia-North America West Coast (NAWC)."
The analysts calculated the monthly deviation from this baseline. While the peak impact of the labour dispute was felt in February 2015, with reliability 70 percentage points below the baseline, it took eight to nine months for reliability to get back to the baseline.
Even if the seasonal impact of Chinese New Year is taken into account, there is no material difference to the picture. Currently, schedule reliability on Asia-NAWC is just 10.1%, which is not markedly different from the 12.6% recorded in February 2015, suggesting a return to pre-pandemic normality would also be eight to nine months.
On the other hand, vessel delays are much worse now (15.07 days) than in 2015 (11.88 days). Compared to a pre-pandemic baseline of 2017-2019, the excess delay in December 2021 versus the pre-pandemic baseline was 11.54 days, versus 8.73 days in February 2015 compared to the pre-labour dispute baseline.
As the 2015 problem was resolved in six to seven months, this means an average reduction in excess delay of 1.25-1.46 days per month.
If the current port and hinterland system manages the same speed of recovery this time, the delays also suggest that resolution would take eight to nine months. Murphy: "That said, the market is showing no indication that we have started on the path to resolution." (sh)