Vessel space from China tightens

The extensive programme of cancelled sailings, by shipping lines on the Asia to Europe trade, will removed almost a third of capacity in the coming weeks and the impact is starting to be felt at origin ports across Asia

The deteriorating global economic outlook has seen carriers make extensive capacity cuts in a bid to match rapidly declining demand, with 25-30% of capacity being taken out of service on the Asia-Europe trades in the coming weeks, with total capacity withdrawals resulting in 435 cancelled sailings and a volume loss of 6.4 million TEU by the end of June.

Currently all Metro shipments are unaffected and everything is being shipped, mainly as per original bookings, but are anticipating some service deterioration in coming weeks as the impact of blank sailings becomes more profound and difficult to manage.

We leverage shipping line allocations, relationships and schedules to maintain service levels and while we expect most weeks to be OK, it is inevitable that there will be some negative impact.

Given sufficient time, we can usually encourage a line to support us, which is why it is critical that shippers give us sufficient booking lead-time.

To illustrate how challenging things are becoming the daily line booking schedules we work with operate on a colour-coding for visual simplicity, with RED being full, YELLOW getting full, GREEN book to commitment and PINK open to all bookings.

There are currently no PINK codes, only 20% of the schedule is GREEN and 30% is blanked.

Our team will continue to use all their ingenuity to overcome these challenges, including moving consignments between alliances, leveraging transhipment, using larger vessels and seeking emergency space.

If you have concerns about pending shipments, or fear that you may be affected by these vessel space issues, we would urge you to contact us without delay.