Maersk Line’s Schedule Reliability Takes a Nosedive in July

Danish container carrier Maersk Line, a long-term top-performer when it comes to global schedule reliability, fell to the back of the ranking list in July, for the first time ever.

The company’s reliability score stood at 75.1% in July, data from market intelligence provider SeaIntel shows.

The United Arab Shipping Company (UASC) followed suit in poor schedule reliability performance achieving 75.9% score.

“Maersk Line had a stellar on-time performance in the first 45 months from July 2011 (when we started the on-time benchmark) to March 2015, coming first in 33 of those months, and only dropping out of the top-2 for a single month,” SeaIntel said.

“The challenge for Maersk Line seems to be seasonal, as they seem to drop in the lower half of the ranking in June-October. It is also likely that the cyber-security incident in late June played a role, as Maersk Line did not update their schedules for several weeks following the incident.”

The cyber attack that hit Maersk on June 27 is expected to damage the company’s business performance by up to USD 300-million in the upcoming quarter.

Overall, global schedule reliability dropped 1.5 percentage points from 77.7% in June to 76.25% in July.

OOCL was the most reliable top 18 carrier in July with an on-time performance of 85.2%, followed by Evergreen with 84.8%. ICL, UAFL, and WEC Lines were all the top performing niche carriers with a perfect schedule reliability score of 100%.

Out of the top 18 carriers, only 11 improved their on-time performance from last month, and the M/M were quite small. PIL improved the most since June, by 3.3 percentage points, while Hamburg Süd saw the biggest decline, of 4.4 percentage points. On a Y/Y, only Evergreen experienced an improvement in schedule reliability, albeit of only 0.8 percentage points.

Across the alliances, Ocean Alliance has continued its strong start with further improvements in schedule reliability, reaching 86.2% in July, an improvement of 2.0 percentage points M/M.

2M, which overtook The Alliance last month, continued its upward trend and improved 5.2 percentage points M/M to reach 81.7% in July. The Alliance saw a second consecutive month of declining schedule reliability, recording a decrease of 1.2 percentage points M/M to 74.0% in July, SeaIntel said.