Sea- Intelligence reports around 50% of overcrowding has been resolved

As schedule reliability gradually improved in August 2022 and ship delays followed, the global fleet unavailable due to these delays fell to 7.9 percent, according to the latest report from Sea-Intelligence, a Danish maritime data company. The peak of 13.8% was in January 2022.

“If we consider 2% base capacity (because there are always delays), then at the peak of delays in January 2022, 11.8% of capacity was used.” said analysts at Sea-Intelligence.

Since this level dropped to 5.9 capacity in August 2022, it means that congestion problems have halved compared to January 2022.

The Danish company notes that significant growth has led to a situation where the lack of physical capacity, which has raised freight rates, is no longer a problem for most trades.

“The question is, how long will it take for this gradual improvement to reach the point where the market completely recovers?” asks Sea- Intelligence’s CEO Alan Murphy, saying only that it can be viewed in many different ways.
Murphy further explained: “The first way is to look at the rate of deterioration in 2020-2021 and the rate of improvement in 2022. Both have fairly similar changes, which means that using this method full normalization should occur in March 2023. . Another way is to compare the current recovery from the post-congestion problems of 2015, although the speed of recovery in 2022 will be faster, it will also start higher, recovery also until March 2023.”
According to the CEO of Sea-Intelligence, a third way is to normalize the 2015 and 2022 developments to the same baseline and create an absorption index equal to 100 points for the respective peaks.

“In this case, we see that relatively the speed of improvement in 2022 is lower than in 2015, but it also suggests that the current situation will fall to the performance of 2015 by January 2023,” he said.
Taken together, all three models show a return to a “normal” 2 baseline of capacity loss by early 2023, assuming current rates.