Maritime data analyst company Sea-Intelligence (SI) has found that “carriers have only announced an additional six blank sailings across the main deep-sea trades, which clearly shows that we have reached a plateau, where carriers are now only blanking very few additional sailings, and for the moment are satisfied that the currently announced blank sailings programme is sufficient to underpin the freight rate levels”.
That’s according Sea-Intelligence CEO Alan Murphy.
Murphy says that by using the company’s Blank Sailing Tracker, “we have been measuring how each individual port will be impacted in terms of blank sailings directly from Asia”.
Following up on the findings of previous analysis of European ports, the consultancy looked at the impact of blank sailings on the ports in North America.
“Looking at 2020-Q2, the hardest-hit ports on the Asia-North America West Coast are Prince Rupert and Long Beach, with both ports seeing a 20-25% reduction in port calls.
“On the Asia-North America East Coast, however, as the US Jones-Act effectively prevents large-scale transhipment ports in North America, with the exception of Freeport in this context, we see a 31% drop in port calls in Freeport as carriers are clearly preferring direct cargo under current circumstances.
“There are currently three ports on the Trans-Pacific trade that are not scheduled to experience blank sailings.”
