In issue 524 of the Sunday Spotlight, we looked at the number of blank sailings per service on an alliance level across Asia-Europe, to see if certain services were blanked more than others. As a word of caution, we need to understand that the purpose of this analysis is not to see how many sailings were blanked by the individual alliances and the reasons behind it (pandemic, congestion, or otherwise); the purpose is to see whether, in all this turmoil, there were significant differences in blank sailings across services within the same carrier alliance.

As not all services have been in operation for the same amount of time, we introduced a new measure called ATBBS (average time between blank sailings) which is calculated in weeks. This measure gives us a degree of comparability across services within each alliance, as a low ATBBS indicates a high degree of blank sailings over the operational life of the service.

Figure 1 shows the ATBBS for each alliance service on Asia-North Europe from January 2020 to September 2021 (92 weeks in total). Each ATBBS figure shows the average number of weeks between each blank sailing. To differentiate between Ocean Alliance’s AEU3-service with 1 blanked sailing over 92 weeks (ATBBS of 92) and AE5/Albatross which did not see a single blank sailing across all 92 weeks (ATBBS also of 92), we have filled the latter in as a pattern.

We can see that there are significant differences in the number of blank sailings per service, especially for 2M and Ocean Alliance. 2M’s AE5/Albatross was not blanked at all since the start of 2020, while the AE55/Griffin and AE6/Lion services on average recorded one blank sailing every 8 weeks. For Ocean Alliance, the AEU3 was blanked only once, while the AEU9 and AEU7 were blanked once every 4-5 weeks. For THE Alliance, the FP1 was blanked once every 15 weeks on average, while the FE2, FE5, and FE4 services were blanked once every 4-5 weeks. On Asia-Mediterranean, we saw a similar trend for 2M, with AE12/Phoenix being blanked on average once every 46 weeks, while the AE11/Jade was blanked once every 9 weeks. For Ocean Alliance and THE Alliance, the differences across services was not as high.

 --- 000 --- END OF PRESS RELEASE --- 000 ---

 All quotes can be attributed to: Alan Murphy, CEO, Sea-Intelligence.
For more information, please contact: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. 

Download press release in PDF		Download press release in Word		Download Excel file with the above chart(s)