In a year plagued with major disruptions, the world’s largest ocean carriers are struggling to deliver shipments on time. A pattern that goes back to early 2023 and suggests the best transportation companies in the world have struggled to meet their expectations ever since thew COVID-19 pandemic came to an end.

The data itself come from Sea Intelligence which has performed periodic assessments on the performance of 15 of the largest ocean carriers in the world. In all, we’ve estimated that these top companies hold control over 86.5% of the over 31 million containers currently in use in global logistics.

In all, the report from Sea Intelligence suggests a worrisome reality. As of june of 2024—using data for the first half of the current year—, global carrier reliability had fallen to 54.4%. This means that premier carriers in the world of logistics are delivering shipments late well over half of times. Half of the world’s cargo—of which 80% travels by ocean—will be late to its destination.

What’s worse is that this has been a pattern for months. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, reliability was riding on a high, consistently scoring above 75%—or three out of every shipments making it on time to ports. However, in the aftermath of the pandemic, reliability fell as low as 30.4% in 2022, as the graph below shows. Although, thereafter, numbers began to improve, they never returned to their pre-pandemic levels. Moreover, since May 2023, reliability has plummeted once more, stabilizing around 50%.

This, in great part, is the result of a number of major disruptions that have plagues the shipping industry over the last couple of months. Chief amongst them are a historic drought in the Panama Canal that has meaningfully reduced the region’s vessel traffic, and a blockade by Houthi rebels of the Suez Canal. Thus, two of the most important trade arteries of the planet are dealing with significantly reduced traffic. At the same time, there have been a number of additional disruptions from port congestion in Singapore, to major labor strikes across ports in the U.S. East Coast. All this, together, has made it difficult for the shipping industry to return to normalcy.

[iframe]https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/PlH2G/1/|CustomHeight=700px[/iframe]

A similar pattern is seen in the duration of average delays for shipments that fail to arrive on time. After reaching a peak of 7.9 days during the COVID-19 pandemic, delays fell down to about four days on average as the graph below shows. However, at the start of 2024, average delays grew once more to up to 6.18 days before falling back to 4.74. However, in recent months, that number has broken the five day mark, reaching average delays of 5.19 days in the most recent data form Sea Intelligence.

[iframe]https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/i5DXj/1/|CustomHeight=700px[/iframe]

It is worth noting that, although delays are become wide spread across the industry, they vary significantly carrier to carrier. The top performer in 2024—at least considering carriers listed by Sea Intelligence—was Hapag-Lloyd, with a reliability score of 55.4%. Meanwhile ZIM scored a 44.4%, making it the worst performing carrier in the dataset. What's most worrisome is that all but one carrier (Yang Ming) experienced meaningful decreases in their reliability, with some seeing falls of over 13 percentage points in reliability (Maersk and MSC).

[iframe]https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/VNz8J/1/|CustomHeight=700px[/iframe]

These recent numbers also suggest a major shake up in the rankings of top carriers when it comes to reliability. Since 2023, Maersk and Hamburg Süd—now a Maersk subsidiary—had held the top position when it came to reliability. MSC had consistently taken the third position with CMA CGM slowly rising to fourth. But, in 2024, theri lead was crushed by the weight of disruptions. In the aftermath, all four were surpassed by Hapag-Lloyd which, then previous year, ranked tenth out of fifteen carriers considered by Sea Intelligence. Yang Ming saw a similar growth in its performance, jumping from the 14th most reliable shipping company in 2023 to the seventh in 2024. CMA CGM and Maersk took the second and third ranks respectively while MSC fell to the sixth position.

As the graph below shows,. Reliability rankings are increasingly variant although, until 2024, the top positions seemed to be fairly consistent. Now, even top performers are jumping around in the ranking in great part due to major disruptions.

[iframe]https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/5byiM/1/|CustomHeight=700px[/iframe]

We wanted to look further at these numbers to estimate which share of the global fleet of containers will be subject to disruptions based on the performance of top carriers. To do so, we multiplied the number of containers handled by the share of times they deliver a shipment late (one minus their reliability performance). Through this simple exercise we were able to estimate that over 10.3 million shipping containers are expected to suffer a delay—and that is only considering the performance of the largest and, arguably, most efficient carriers in the world; carriers that, again, control 86.5% of all containers. This means, in turn, that 33.18% of all containers will arrive with a delay in 2024. That is, a third of all containers in the planet will suffer delays.

[iframe]https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/5L0Bs/2/|CustomHeight=700px[/iframe]

Above all, this data suggests how unreliable the shipping industry can be when it is subject to major disruptions as has been the case throughout 2024. Reliability can change in a matter of months and carriers that were once the best performers can fall significantly in the ranks. 

We work with companies to gain visibility to the performance to their carriers so they can make the best decisions for their supply chain and mitigate the impact of disruptions. If your company could benefit from analytics like these, make sure to schedule a demo of our product.