The on-time percentage of liner services reliability improved slightly in February but while a higher ratio of ships were hitting their schedules, for those that missed the berthing window the length of delay widened, according to Drewry’s enhanced product Carrier Performance Insight (http://cpi.drewry.co.uk), which is now delivered online and updated every month.

Some 55% of ships in the three key East-West trades arrived within +/- 24 hours from the advertised ETA, up by 6.6 percentage points against January’s historical low of 49%. The average deviation from the ETA to actual arrival extended from 1.9 days in January to 2.1 days.

The most reliable carrier in February was Maersk Line with an average on-time performance of 76%, the same as in January. Some 10 points adrift were Cosco on 66%, Evergreen on 65% and K Line with 63%. At the bottom of the rankings were Wan Hai (38%) and PIL (14%).

“The monthly on-timer percentage improvement was the result of higher reliability in the Asia-Europsope trade, which seems to have benefited from more settled services now that the new alliance structures are in full swing,” said Simon Heaney, senior manager of supply chain research at Drewry.

“The Transpacific trade continued to suffer despite the mid-month resolution to the US West Coast labour contract dispute and was largely responsible for the longer overall deviation,” Heaney added.

To highlight the impact of the USWC labour dispute on reliability, out of the 743 Transpacific ships calling at either Los Angeles or Long Beach during February only 8% arrived as planned, with the average deviation a huge 10.7 days. In January the same figures were 17% and 4.2 days respectively.

“The end of the USWC labour dispute and the bedding in of new alliance services should mean that reliability has hit the floor and will improve in the coming months, albeit slowly,” said Heaney.

Building on Drewry’s long established schedule reliability benchmarking that started back in 2005, the new Carrier Performance Insight (http://cpi.drewry.co.uk) provides the ability to benchmark the reliability performance of container carriers on a port-to-port, trade lane, service and industry-wide basis. This information is available via a user-friendly website powered by data from e-commerce platform CargoSmart.