Sea transportation is crucial to international trade because it carries more than 90% of the world's goods. According to statistics, about 60% of the goods are transported in containers. Considering the huge dependence of global transportation on the shipping industry, the shipping schedule reliability of shipping services has attracted much attention.
Since covid began to cause serious damage worldwide in 2020, container transportation has attracted particular attention, ships are constantly delayed, and carriers are largely unable to comply with their published navigation schedule.
The average reliability of shipping schedule of container shipping companies has always hovered around 66%, which means that only two-thirds of ships arrive on time; This figure is considered unacceptable in most other industries. In the past year, even in this era of COVID-19 and post epidemic, even such a low benchmark has become a daydream. The overall shipping reliability of the container shipping industry has bottomed out, and once reached a bad 33% in August 2021.
This is even more surprising considering that in most cases, timely delivery is defined as "plus or minus 1 day from the scheduled date of call (at the port)". This actually means that the container carrier has an error margin of 2 days, and the ship docking is not included in the delayed docking.
As the most obvious element in the transport chain, most of the responsibility for these delays is attributed to the container carrier; However, in fact, there are many different factors at work, all of which, alone or in combination with other factors, mainly lead to slow delivery.