No easy task to determine fastest trans-Pacific services It is becoming increasingly difficult for a shipper to determine which carrier in the eastbound trans-Pacific has the fastest transit time between two given ports, according to a new analysis from SeaIntel, a consulting firm. “Many carriers include transit times in their marketing materials aimed at convincing shippers to source their shipping needs from the carrier’s services,” SeaIntel wrote in its Aug. 10 Sunday Spotlight newsletter. The difficulty for shippers assessing comparative transit times is that due to a proliferation of alliances, vessel sharing agreements and slot purchasing, multiple carriers can credibly declare their transit times to be the fastest.” “More than one carrier can claim to have the fastest transit time on the same port-to-port combination, either because two services are scheduled to complete the voyage in the same time or because both carriers are onboard the same service,” SeaIntel said. For the analysis, SeaIntel focused only on the time a vessel spends at sea, given that not all carriers publish cargo cut-off and availability times, while nearly all publish port-to-port times, though not all of them have online functionality that works. It said it was “forced to exclude CSCL (China Shipping Container Line) and Wan Hai from the analysis, as CSCL does not have an online port-to-port search tool and Wan Hai’s tool did not work.” According to SeaIntel, “it is clear that ‘best transit time’ is a bit of a misnomer, as many of the carriers claiming to have the best transit time are essentially offering what a majority of their competitors offer. With the increasing commoditization and the increased prevalence of carrier alliances and VSAs on the main east-west trades, this should hardly come as a surprise.” Learn more about the trans-Pacific trade with JOC’s Trans-Pacific Eastbound market data dashboard The actual transit times between the port pairs that SeaIntel analyzed were based on vessel performance from January to June 2014, as recorded in its Global Liner Performance (GLP) Database. “Many of the carriers are able to offer the same transit time as they are on board the same services, either through carrier alliances, Vessel Sharing Agreements (VSAs) or slot purchases, which means that shippers can get the same core products from multiple carriers,” the consulting firm said. Among the marketing statements of carriers claiming to have the fastest transit time that it analyzed, it found that many statements were untrue. “The carriers are only correct in roughly half the cases when claiming to be the fastest,” SeaIntel said. Among those that were correct in the statements they made, SeaIntel identified a number of them. CMA CGM was correct in saying its PEX3 service had the fastest transit time from Yantian to Los Angeles at 13 days. For Busan to Los Angeles, Cosco’s PSX service, MOL’s CC1 and and Hyundai Merchant Marine’s CC1 services were all correctly identified as citing 11 days as the fastest transit between those two ports. HMM’s SC2 was correct in being identified as the fastest transit from Kaohsiung to Long Beach at 12 days. JOC NEWS - AUG 11 2014
Posted on: Tue, 12 Aug 2014 21:23:28 +0000
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