Enmeshed in change

Wednesday, 09 July 2008

ONCE again, our examination of the performance of carriers serving the trade to China, Hong Kong and Taiwan has been a rather disappointing exercise. This is mainly due to the poor time-keeping of many of the operations covered – but also to a number of strings being restructured during or after the survey window, rendering results somewhat irrelevant.

As for the weak time-keeping performance, the lines cannot take all the blame for the state of affairs. This certainly applies to those one-off occurrences that occasionally cause severe problems for shipping lines, of which a handful took place during the monitoring period for this survey.

A classic example was the incident in which part of a gantry crane fell into the Osaka Express at Southampton in mid-January. This kept the ship in port for over two weeks, and also resulted in the extraordinary maximum ‘days late’ figure given for the Grand Alliance EU3 operation in the table of schedule reliability.

This incident also delayed the MOL Promise, which remained at the port for a week, negatively affecting the New World Alliance JEX. This was the last call by the grouping at Southampton on this particular loop.

Another less dramatic incident was the grounding of CMA CGM Don Carlos in the Suez Canal on an eastbound FAL1 voyage in February, forcing the line to cut certain calls, including Shanghai.
Yet, generally speaking, it was a succession of delays in European ports that undermined carrier performance, due mainly to a combination of high volumes and weather-related problems, although the Osaka Express incident affected Southampton for some weeks.

Invariably, the European circuit on many operations took several days longer than expected, leading to ships leaving Europe so late that they had no chance of making up time on the outbound trip.
Among operations particularly affected were the Grand Alliance EU2 and EU3 loops, and it is perhaps no coincidence that the grouping’s best-performing loop was the EU4, which no longer calls at Southampton.

The usual response when ships are running too late to make up time is to skip one or two ports, and this strategy was much in evidence, as the footnotes to the schedule reliability and transit time tables attest. Yet it must be stressed that the ports listed there are only the base ports covered by this survey – others were also omitted on many occasions.

Yet in a growing number of cases this has not been enough, and on several operations ships have been moved back to the following schedule position to give them an extra week to get back on track. This has usually followed the phase-in of a new ship, filling the gap left by shifting ships down the schedule, but on occasional weeks there has been no sailing.

The operations that missed a week or two for this or other reasons are listed in the footnotes to the table. However, it should be borne in mind that the survey period does cover the quietest period of the year, when volumes do not always justify providing a sailing each week.

The operations affected by the ‘vessel shifts’ described above included the Grand Alliance EU2, EU3 and EU4 loops, CMA CGM FAL3, “K” Line/[Yangming] JES/AE2, the two Cosco-operated strings and the MSC Silk Express.

The results for these operations tend to be weak, as the pro forma arrival times are based on the departure slot from Europe, yet the ships affected were gradually moved back to fill the later slot at the turning port in the Far East. In some instances the actual schedule was not exactly clear, and this has led to the CSCL AEX1 operation being omitted entirely from the results.

The thorough restructuring of the Maersk Europe/Far East network also made its results largely irrelevant, given the differences from the current operational pattern, but they have been included in the table for the record.

As discussed in Part One, some operations were adjusted to provide more time to complete their itineraries, in some cases gaining an extra week with no alteration to port calls. Yet oddly, these were often ones that were already performing quite well, suggesting that it is the fuel savings rather than the schedule issues that were the main factor.

Those extended without changes to their port-calling patterns during or just after the monitoring period were the New World Alliance JEX and AEX, the CMA CGM FAL3 and Hanjin FEX.

Given the difficulties which lines have been facing, it might be argued that any operation with an average of less than one calendar day behind schedule should be commended, but whatever the case, there are a handful of operations that are certainly worthy of praise.

 Those with the five best averages were the new Yangming-operated AE3 (although as a relatively new operation this is based on a small sample), the UASC AEC1, the New World Alliance AEX and the two Evergreen loops, the CEM and CES.

Looking at the individual sectors (Hong Kong/Southern China, Central China and Taiwan) – and allowing for skipped calls and averaging the results of lines/groupings involved in several strings – a single winner emerges in all three. This is a remarkable achievement for this line – Evergreen.

As for transit times from the UK, the identification of Star Performers is far from straightforward. While times on individual loops may be better than others, it is the combining of results of multi-loop networks that causes the main problem.

To central China, there is a clear winner in the joint AES/AE1 operation of “K” Line and Yangming, whose times to Shanghai from Felixstowe were measurably faster than the second-placed Evergreen CEM from Thamesport.

It might be noted that there is now tougher competition from two new operations to Shanghai – the Grand Alliance EU5 has the same fast scheduled times of 24 days from Southampton, while Zim offers a schedule of 25 days on the EWX from Tilbury.

To Hong Kong, the New World Alliance lines are days ahead of their rivals from the UK, and the same applies to the “K” Line/[Yangming] JES/AE2 to Shenzhen. Some serious competition has recently emerged to the latter – but they are actually providing it themselves, through their new AE3 loop.
Finally, to Taiwan, there is far less to choose between the leading lines – Hanjin/Cosco, “K” Line/Yangming, the New World Alliance and Evergreen.

The Hanjin/[Cosco] FEX loop had the fastest times by a fraction here, although FEX ships did by-pass Felixstowe four times over the survey period. The Liner Analysis ground rules do still allow it to take the honours here, although it should be noted that the recent extension of round-trip times on the FEX has now left the “K” Line/Yangming AES/AE1 in pole position, based on scheduled times to Kaohsiung.