News / Unreliability is the 'new normal' for container shipping

ID 264216174 © Korn Vitthayanukarun

While the container shipping has left  behind the chaos of the pandemic years, new Sea-Intelligence data suggests it has also left behind the service standards that once defined it.  

According to the maritime intelligence company, 2025 marked the consolidation of a new operational reality, “effectively normalising reliability below the historical standard”. 

Its data showed that global average schedule reliability reached 61.5% last year, an improvement of 8.5 percentage points from the 2024 low of 53% – yet within Sea-Intelligence’s 14-year dataset, that performance ranks only 11th out of 14.  

It said: “While the recovery from 2024 is clear, 2025 remains well below the 70%-80% reliability band that defined the market prior to 2020.”

And Sea-Intelligence added that 2025 was associated with weaker performances such as in 2020 and 2023, rather than the industry’s historical highs. 

Source: Sea-Intelligence

Sea-Intelligence identified a two-phase trajectory across last year. Q1 was marked by “deep underperformance”, with January reliability just 51.4%, ranking 12th historically compared with 2014-2024 Januarys.  

“Early 2025 operations were nearly indistinguishable from the unstable baseline of the post-2020 lows,” the analyst said. 

However, it said, momentum improved sharply in the second quarter, and between April and May, schedule reliability jumped by 7.4 percentage points month on month, lifting performance out of the bottom tier.  

But even in its strongest months of August, September, November, and December, 2025 never ranked higher than ninth historically.  

“The network stabilised, but lacked the fluidity to challenge established historical highs,” Sea-Intelligence summarised.  

Source: Sea-Intelligence

Average delays for all vessel arrivals fell to 1.58 days in 2025. While this was a notable improvement from the 2.21 days in 2024, it was still well above the sub 1.2-day averages that prevailed between 2012 and 2019. This placed last year 10th out of 14 years for delay performance.

Source: Sea-Intelligence

The silver lining, perhaps, is that 43% of the vessels arriving late in 2025 were delayed by just two to three days, up three percentage points year on year, meaning extreme delays became less common. Arrivals late by more than 12 days fell from 6% in 2024 to 4% in 2025.  

“The market is effectively trading ‘extreme, multi-week disruptions’ for ‘manageable, short-term’ ones,” the report said. 

Source: Sea-Intelligence

Having made their Gemini Cooperation USP delivering reliability of 90%+, Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd were the only two carriers to post median reliability above 70%. Indeed, Maersk set the operational ceiling with its average of 72.9% of on-time arrival and a peak monthly score of 80.9%. 

At a tradelane level, Sea-Intelligence found that 2025 was “universally a sub-optimal year, by historical standards”, noting: “Not a single tradelane recorded a schedule reliability rank between 1 and 4, meaning that on every major tradelane, there have been at least four other years in the past decade with better schedule reliability than 2025.” 

The best relative performances were recorded on the Oceania-North America lane, ranked fifth, and Asia-North America West Coast at sixth.  

But the analyst added: “Even for these tradelanes, 2025 represents a median performance rather than a return to peak efficiency.

“2025 avoided pandemic-era lows, but it remains structurally weaker than the pre-2020 norm,” it summarised.