High standard continues

Wednesday, 07 October 2009

Once again, liner performance in the trade from North Europe to the Andean region of South America has been of an admirable standard, with both the Caribbean and Pacific coast routes ranking highly in the list of trades covered by the Liner Analysis series. 

Unfortunately it is not possible to give a proper assessment of relay services due to the difficulty in establishing connections at the hub ports, and this means that several services have to be excluded from the results. 

Where possible, a result for arrivals at the transshipment hub on the first leg of a relay service are given, yet while Maersk and APL/MOL are included (the latter through the New World Alliance APX), insufficient data was available for two other important relay operations – Evergreen at Colón (CCT) and MSC at Balboa. 

The Maersk result is for Balboa, and it was affected by a handful of small delays either at the port or during the canal transit, as all its ships arrived at the other hub of Manzanillo (MIT) on the scheduled day.
Maersk’s average of days behind schedule at San Antonio was very good indeed, but there again, so were those of CSAV at the same port and of the EuroAndes grouping at neighbouring Valparaíso. 

The EuroAndes lines also performed well at Callao on their main loop – an operation that was only let down over the 20 weeks by a ship being delayed a few days at Antwerp on one voyage. However, the other EuroAndes sling and the CSAV operation did not do so well at Callao, and this pulled their overall averages down. 

This left Maersk Line in the top spot, although as its relay service to Callao has not been monitored, and as the EuroAndes lines move virtually all UK shipments to Callao on the better-performing loop, it is only fair that the schedule reliability award for the Pacific coast should be shared. 

As Maersk transships to Cartagena, our Caribbean base port, its time-keeping in this sector cannot be monitored, and this restricts the contest to CSAV, EuroAndes and the Europe Caribbean Service grouping. 

The latter suffered frequent delays in berthing at Cartagena. but the others turned in excellent performances, with CSAV just edging it from its former partners in the EuroAndes grouping. 

The direct operators to Cartagena have a distinct advantage over the relayers, with fast scheduled times of between 12 and 17 days from the UK. On paper, MSC has a marginal edge over the Europe Caribbean Service, and while the latter came out on top for actual monitored times, they did skip Tilbury on four occasions, and the Liner Analysis award is consequently shared between them. 

However, it should be pointed out there is no direct link from the UK to Venezuela or to Colombian ports other than Cartagena (the EuroAndes second loop calls at Puerto Cabello, but not in the UK), and here the relay operators come into their own. 

To the Pacific coast, Maersk puts its competitors in the shade to San Antonio, even though transit times from Tilbury have been lengthened due to the extension of the round voyage by a week – as they were at the same time last year, incidentally. 

To Callao, Maersk’s scheduled times are now the same as CSAV’s, and very close to its other rivals. As the voyage involves transshipment, through times could not be monitored, although as times to Balboa in the survey window were faster than the ones now schedule, it is likely to have pipped the opposition here as well. 

Yet on the basis of San Antonio alone, Maersk does enough to take the crown for transit times from the UK to the Pacific coast.