To gauge which of the three container carrier alliances recorded the fastest post-pandemic recovery in schedule reliability, Danish maritime data analysis company Sea-Intelligence pegged their lowest recorded schedule reliability during the pandemic as month “0” and then looked at the change from that baseline in the next months.
Figure 1 covers the Asia-North Europe trade lane. “In just the second month after dropping to its lowest point, 2M had improved schedule reliability by 20 percentage points, whereas the improvements for Ocean Alliance and THE Alliance were both under 10 percentage points,” pointed out Sea-Inteligence analysts.
By the seventh month, 2M almost reached a recovery of 50 percentage points, with the other two alliances lagging severely behind. Ocean Alliance 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,” concludes Alan Murphy, CEO of Sea-Intelligence.
In fact, on both Asia-Europe trade lanes, 2M has seen rapid improvements in schedule reliability after dropping to its lowest point during the pandemic, however, while they continued on this trajectory on Asia-North Europe (as previously mentioned), their rate of recovery on Asia-Mediterranean slowed down considerably, according to the analysis.
“Ocean Alliance on the other hand, while having a relatively slower rate of improvement on Asia-North Europe, has largely been consistent in schedule reliability improvements in the months after their lowest figure of the pandemic,” noted Murphy, adding that “THE Alliance has seen a relatively slower rate of recovery on Asia-North Europe, picking up in recent months, while seeing the opposite trend on Asia-Mediterranean.”
