Drewry has published the weekly Cancelled Sailings Tracker service which provides a snapshot of cancelled sailings announced by each container shipping alliance against the total number of scheduled sailings.
During the eighth week (20 February – 26 February) and the 12th week (20 March – 26 March) of the year, 71 cancelled sailings were announced throughout the Transpacific, Transatlantic, and Asia-North Europe & Mediterranean trades, indicating a 10% cancellation rate.
According to Drewry’s report, 65% of the blank sailings will be in the Transpacific Eastbound traffic, 28% in Asia-North Europe and the Mediterranean, and 7% in the Transatlantic Westbound trade.
The Drewry shipping analysts said THE Alliance (Hapag-Lloyd, Yang Ming, ONE and HMM) has announced 43 cancellations for the next five weeks, followed by OCEAN Alliance (CMA CGM, COSCO, Evergreen and OOCL) and 2M (MSC and Maersk) with 12 and 4 cancellations, respectively. Meanwhile, 12 blank sailings were deployed in non-alliance services over the same period of time.
Drewry noted that attempts of the ocean carriers to align supply with demand have failed to reverse the decline in spot rates in a market where East-West load factors also continue to weaken.
Following the period of extensive blank sailings and service suspensions over Chinese New Year (21 January – 20 February), there will be fewer cancelled sailings in March than seen over the July 2022-February 2023 period, resulting in more capacity being released., according to the report.
Drewry said that between the eighth and the twelfth weeks of the year, only 71 cancellations have been announced, compared to 171 between the fourth and the eighth weeks of 2023.
