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The world’s largest container transhipment hubs are tottering under the weight of their own success, with massive numbers of vessel calls undermining port productivity, according to a new analysis from Sea-Intelligence Consulting.
Its analysts have conducted an exhaustive statistical analysis of schedule reliability on global shipping tradelanes, which largely draws its conclusions from the difference between “unweighted” and “weighted” on-time vessel arrival data.
In short, the unweighted schedule reliability “treats all ports within a region equally, which indicates the general operational health at the regional port network”; while weighted schedule reliability takes into account the number of vessel arrivals at a port by dividing the total regional on-time calls by total regional arrivals. This gives “proportional influence to high-volume hub ports, reflecting the actual probability of an individual vessel arriving on time”.
The result is that, where there is considerable difference between a region’s unweighted and weighted schedule reliability, it indicates there are particular ports – mostly the larger transhipments hubs – that drag down regional performance.
And, according to Sea-Intelligence, this is most observable on the Asia-North Europe trade, and chimes with anecdotal evidence provided to The Loadstar from shippers and forwarders.
For example, in the run-up to the pre-Chinese New Year peak season, one UK forwarder told The Loadstar how problems in European transhipment hubs were degrading the efficiency of UK supply chains.
“From UK perspective, the Premier Alliance’s FE3, which calls North Europe before the UK, is being seriously delayed in Algeciras and Rotterdam, putting approximately two weeks on transit times.
“So to avoid this, pressure is being put upon the carriers by us and shippers to tranship UK cargo in Singapore onto the FP2/FE4, to reduce transit times – although this in turn puts additional space pressure on these two UK services.
“The carriers are putting in contingencies, omitting Algeciras and now Rotterdam, and discharging Rotterdam cargo in Antwerp instead,” they added.
Meanwhile, Sea-Intelligence said: “In these specific regions [Asia and North Europe], the schedule reliability underperformance at massive transhipment hubs dragged the continental volume-weighted averages down by over five percentage points, compared with their unweighted baselines.”
On a port specific basis, the chart below shows show Shanghai, Singapore, and Ningbo – Asia’s largest container ports, each of which handles more than 4,000 containership calls annually – all with schedule reliability levels around 10% below the regional average, while Port Klang and Shekou were 15% and 20%, respectively, below the regional average.
Source: Sea-Intelligence Consulting
“Because these specific hubs process such an overwhelming majority of the region’s vessel call volume, their operational lag entirely eclipsed the positive schedule adherence recorded at other gateways, like Yantian,” Sea-Intelligence noted.
It added that it was a similar picture in North Europe, where Rotterdam, Antwerp, and Hamburg all have schedule reliability levels below the regional average, although with fewer overall vessel calls than their Asian counterparts – Rotterdam received 1,200 box ship calls in the same period – the difference from the regional average is less pronounced…
Source: Sea-Intelligence Consulting
… although the contrast with better-performing ports, such as Wilhelmshaven, Bremerhaven, and Dunkirk, was far more pronounced.
“The primary hubs shippers traditionally rely on suffered from persistent structural congestion, creating a severe hub penalty across the global supply chain.
“These localised low-reliability conditions at the mega-hubs force a strategic re-evaluation of network routing – as the data shows, massive throughput volume is currently exhibiting localised schedule degradation, meaning that defaulting to the largest transhipment nodes is no longer a guarantee of reliability,” the analyst added.
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