Carriers keep the price pressure on – a 'shock and awe' PSS the standout
Container spot freight rates on the transpacific and Asia-Europe trades rose for the sixth consecutive ...
The east-west Mediterranean container feeder network is again coming under acute stress from the geopolitical tension in the Middle East.
However, in contrast to the surging port congestion seen across container terminals in the West Med in the immediate aftermath of the Red Sea crisis, the new problems for shippers and their forwarders centre around container availability and feeder shipping schedules.
According to Italian container management firm Sogese, “containers are out there, but they are not where or when the market needs them”.
“The market today is defined by how efficiently equipment can move, not how much of it exists.” said Andrea Monti, its CEO & MD. “This is not a supply problem, it’s a circulation problem,” he added.
From the point of view of importers in central Mediterranean markets, such as Italy, this is being compounded by the rerouting of ships round the Cape of Good Hope and the increasing dependence on West Mediterranean hubs, “such as Algeciras and Tanger Med”.
Mr Monti added that this, in turn, has led to an increasing reliance on feeder networks for distribution into Southern Europe, “turning the final leg of the journey into a key point of volatility”, with feeder networks having to handle ever greater volumes while connection windows tighten, partly due to mainline schedule unreliability, leading to rising costs on specific corridors.
“The feeder leg is no longer secondary, it is increasingly where both cost and reliability are determined,” he said.
According to the latest schedule reliability report from Sea-Intelligence, the 21 deepsea services from Asia to the Mediterranean collectively saw a 64.7% on-time arrival rate in January/February, a month-on-month decrease of 2.7 percentage points.
However, it was 21.5 percentage points compared with the 43.2% on-time arrival rate recorded at the same time last year.
Nonetheless, congestion at Algeciras and Tanger Med still appears to be relatively elevated, according to Xeneta’s eeSea liner database, which today recorded 50% of vessels at Algeciras waiting for a berth, and 27% at Tanger Med.
The eeSea data also shows that, on Asia-Mediterranean, feeder ,and intra-regional services calling at the main Italian import gateways of Genoa and La Spezia, on-time vessel arrivals have fallen to levels last seen in mid-2024 – the average ship arriving five days late at Genoa last month, and eight days late at La Spezia.
“Italy reflects broader European dynamics, with added sensitivity to routing shifts and feeder reliability,” a Sogese market report states.
“Italy remains resilient, but commercially more complex to serve – forwarders face margin pressure as operating costs rise while customers remain price-sensitive,” it adds.
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