Sea-Intelligence: New Baseline for Delay Absorption

In the latest issue of the Sunday Spotlight, Sea-Intelligence analysed the continuing impact of vessel delays on the operational availability of global container capacity. Based on the March 2026 Global Liner Performance data, it is evident that despite carrier efforts to improve schedule reliability, the market has not experienced a reversal to pre‑pandemic levels. Instead, global schedule reliability has settled into a lower range of 50‑65%, alongside an increase in the average magnitude of late vessel arrivals to roughly 5 days.

The share of delayed vessels, combined with the duration of the delays, can be used to calculate the amount of capacity effectively absorbed by vessel delays and hence unavailable to the market. During the 2011‑2019 pre‑pandemic period, the amount of capacity absorbed by delays formed a highly stable structural baseline of 2.2%, fluctuating by a mere +/- 0.5%. This reliable baseline was implicitly factored into the global supply/demand balance.

If we look at Figure 1, which illustrates the global capacity absorbed by vessel delays in excess of the 2.2% baseline, we can see that the deviation now consistently ranges between 2% and 4% above that historical baseline, with no indication of near‑term improvement. The total share of global capacity absorbed by vessel delays has effectively doubled to tripled, settling at an average of 5.3% for the 2023‑2026 period.

The nominal impact of this structural deterioration in schedule reliability is highly significant. At a 5.3% absorption rate, the global market is continuously “missing” 1.8 million TEU of vessel capacity. If we isolate only the 3.1% excess above the historical 2.2% baseline, the industry is still losing 1.06 million TEU of active capacity.

This means that a fleet the size of the world’s 8^th largest carrier – HMM – has been effectively removed from the market exclusively due to the new, lower baseline of schedule reliability.

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