On-time vessel arrivals have declined across all 14 of Asia’s busiest container ports, with extreme weather and global supply chain disruptions cited as the primary causes.
Sea-news.az reports this based on data from Sea-Intelligence analysts.
According to the report, consecutive typhoons caused severe delays at Shanghai and Ningbo-Zhoushan, which are considered the world’s two largest container ports.
In July, only 34.6 percent of vessels arrived on time at the Ningbo-Zhoushan port, while the figure dropped to just 21 percent at the port of Shanghai. For Shanghai, this performance marked the lowest level recorded in the past 14 years.
The sharpest decline was registered at the Yantian port in southern China, where the on-time arrival rate plunged by 23.5 percentage points to 48.3 percent.
The situation was similarly discouraging at other major Asian ports. In July, on-time arrival rates stood at:
- Hong Kong – 51.6%
- Singapore – 43.2%
- Busan – 40.9%
- Keelung – 33.3%
The delays originating in major Asian ports have also affected schedule reliability across global container shipping, with the global on-time performance index falling to 56.1 percent in July.
Sea-Intelligence warns that the congestion building up at these ports could trigger additional delays along other major shipping routes in the coming months.
The bottlenecks at Asian ports are also prompting shifts in the route strategies of certain shipping companies, with some carriers beginning to consider returning to routes passing through the Suez Canal and the Red Sea.
If this trend continues, it could place additional pressure on transit times and logistics costs across global container shipping.
