In issue 726 of the Sea-Intelligence Sunday Spotlight we analyse the weekly capacity offered on individual liner services and find it has become drastically more volatile and unpredictable on the major East/West trades since the pandemic. This growing instability creates "lumpier" flows of cargo into ports, with services on the Asia-Europe trade lanes seeing volatility more than double, a trend that is a contributing factor to persistent port congestion problems.
While a liner service ideally offers stable and predictable capacity each week, practical realities – such as using different-sized vessels, blank sailings, or schedule delays – cause the actual weekly TEU on individual services to fluctuate. To capture this volatility, we calculated the standard deviation in vessel capacity, seen over a 52-week rolling window to eliminate any seasonality effects. The data reveals a sharp structural shift since 2020. (....)