Sea-Intelligence has found that capacity changes on the Asia-North Europe trade route have become highly volatile, with a significant increase in the variability of vessel capacity over the past decade.
The firm has estimated the standard deviation of the weekly change in capacity over a 52-week period, highlighting that these weekly swings can be rather severe-particularly during Chinese New Year and Golden Week-making it difficult to identify underlying trends.
The figure below depicts the relationship between Asia and North Europe.
Sea-Intelligence truncated the y-axis to ensure that the pandemic-induced increase did not overshadow the longer-term data.
Alan Murphy, CEO of Sea-Intelligence, commented: “What we see here is that the volatility in the vessel capacity on the Asia-North Europe trade has grown quite significantly over the past decade, from a semi-stable level around 10 per cent pre-pandemic, to presently a level three times that magnitude.
“This means that the ability for shippers to rely on a stable level of capacity on the Asia-North Europe backbone trade has been eroded considerably, which in turn calls for the need for better contingency planning, even when the market has sufficient scheduled capacity.”
Transpacific trades, on the other hand, have not been as volatile as Asia-North Europe, with Asia-North America West Coast now appearing to be more reliable in terms of weekly capacity given to shippers.
Over a 52-week period from September 2023 to August 2024, the weekly offered capacity in Asia-North Europe has a standard variation of over 90,000 TEU, reported Sea-Intelligence.
The two Transpacific trades have a standard variance of around 50,000 TEU per week, whereas Asia-Mediterranean has a standard deviation of 34,000 TEU per week.
In July, Sea-Intelligence found that the Asia to North America West Coast trade route is set to experience a notable rise in the proportion of shipping capacity provided by non-alliance operators.
