Port Congestion in Shipping: What You Should Know - Desteia

Port Congestion in Shipping: What You Should Know

Port congestion is likely the single most important cause for disruptions in ocean trade. Yet, despite its prominence as a constant pain to logistics operators, it is rarely used as a means to estimate delays to existing routes.

Jose Luis Sabau

25 de noviembre de 2024

Introduction

That is why we decided to take matters into our own hands and build a framework that can leverage existing data on port congestions to find just how likely it is that a shipment will make it on time. Our findings suggest that, for the case being studied, top carriers could experience delays equivalent to between 20.6 and 49.7 days just from port congestion alone as of the time of writing. And any additional stop to a route could account for an additional delay of up to 4.1 days.

Understanding Maritime Transportation

When you are sending a container from one port to another, it will very rarely arrive at its end destination without making a number of stops along the way. Quite the opposite, container ships travel with a fixed schedule of stops set by the ocean carrier who operates them. Therefore, delays at any one of those ports will also have an impact on the end destination.

There is no standardized data set on the ocean routes of top carriers—and when that data does exist, it is often limited to the start and end of each route. To address this issue, we decided to make a dataset on our own by looking at all publicly listed ocean routes for five of the largest carriers in existence: Maersk, CMA CGM, COSCO, Hapag-Lloyd, and MSC. Together, these five companies alone operate 64.5% of all containers at sea, making them a highly representative sample for an initial study.

We focused our exploration on routes containing Mexico due to the country’s rising prominence in global trade, as Western countries seek to replace China as a manufacturing partner. We had conducted an initial dataset of similar routes earlier this year but expanded it for this exploration. For each route, we recorded every port listed by carriers as well as the expected time the entire route should take from beginning to end.

Top Carrier Routes

In all, our dataset includes 85 ocean routes from the carriers listed. Each carrier had different amounts of routes that included Mexico. Maersk had the most by far, accounting for 29% of our data, followed by MSC and Hapag Lloyd with 21% each. The average route in our dataset consisted of 7.7 stops at different ports (including the start and end points).

Routes Including Mexico by Top Carriers

A donut chart showing the share of routes including Mexico by top carriers in a dataset by Auba Research.

Source: CMA CGM, COSCO, Hapag Lloyd, Maersk, and MSC.

In terms of geographic split, we accounted for 102 ports connected to Mexico via ocean trade. The map below plots the coordinates for all the ports in our dataset, with the size of each dot representing the number of routes that port has leading to Mexico. Interestingly, the port of Busan had the most routes leading to a Mexican port with 26 across our dataset, followed by Houston (20 routes to Mexico) and the ports of Balboa, Panama (19 routes) and Shanghai (19 routes).

Ports Connecting Mexico by Ocean Trade (2024)

A world map showing the location of ports with routes to Mexico through ocean trade, with the size of each dot representing the number of routes connecting to Mexico as of 2024.

Port Wait Times

Having this dataset of routes, we then looked at current estimates of wait times for the ports leading to Mexico as well as those currently recorded in Mexican ports. The map below shows current wait times at each of the 102 ports considered in this study, with the size of each dot representing the days currently predicted a vessel will have to wait before entering the port.

Current Wait Time at Ports Connecting Mexico (2024)

A world map showing the location of ports with routes to Mexico through ocean trade with the size of each dot representing the current delays at each port as of November 25th, 2024.

Source: Access Port Congestion Data Here.

We then merged the data from current ocean routes to/from Mexico with the wait times expected at all the ports mentioned in the route’s official description. This allowed us to contrast the predicted length of the route by carriers with the additional delays one could expect from current congestions.

In all, we found that there is a large discrepancy between the initial quoted length and the additional delays containerships are likely to experience at the ports along its route. On average, we found that the average port in the routes considered has a delay of about 4.18 days. This number is close to estimates indicating the average shipment arrives late to a port by about 5.19 days. Given that the average route in our dataset has 7.7 stops, this implies an additional 32 days to complete the average route.

Shipping Visibility For Smooth Shipping

We believe companies should have complete visibility to these disruptions as they plan their production plans. That is why we built a comprehensive platform that gives you end-to-end visibility on your shipments and potential disruptions to them. If you’d like to see how port congestion could impact your company, make sure to schedule a demo.