Container delays tie up 1.7 million TEUs globally

Delays absorb 5% of global deep-sea capacity.

Global container vessel schedule reliability has remained broadly stable at around 60% to 65%, well below the 70% to 80% level seen during the 2011-2019 period, according to Sea-Intelligence.

Late vessel arrivals are also taking longer, with average delays settling at around 5 to 5.5 days, compared with 3 to 4 days before the pandemic. The longer and more frequent delays are reducing the amount of global shipping capacity available to move cargo.

Between 2011 and 2019, an average 2.2% of global container shipping capacity was tied up by vessel delays. That figure has since more than doubled to 5.0% of global deep-sea capacity.

The current 5.0% absorption rate means around 1.7 million TEUs of global container capacity is effectively unavailable because of persistent delays.

That amount would be equivalent to the fleet size of the world's eighth-largest container shipping company, ranking just behind Evergreen.

The additional 2.8 percentage points of capacity absorbed above the pre-pandemic baseline represents around 1.0 million TEUs of unavailable capacity. That is almost equivalent to the total capacity of HMM, currently the world's eighth-largest container shipping line.