Carriers’ Wait-and-See Approach Causes Capacity Crisis on Asia-North America Trade Route
Carriers have been slow to cut capacity in response to a volume crash in the last four months of 2022 on the Asia-North America West Coast (NAWC) trade route. Instead, they have adopted a wait-and-see approach, leading to scheduled capacity changing drastically as deployment approaches.
As we can see the planned deployment for Weeks 7-9 in 2023 on the Asia-North American West Coast, they were at various points in time (‘Actual’ refers to the planned deployment, ‘Week 0’ refers to the planned deployment recorded in the same week as the planned deployment, i.e. planned capacity for Weeks 7 as recorded in Week 7 etc., ‘-1’ refers to the planned deployment one week prior to the planned deployment, i.e. planned capacity for Weeks 7
On the Asia-North America West Coast, excess capacity ranging from 20% to 40% is scheduled for deployment in the coming weeks, which carriers have been correcting in recent weeks. This pattern was also seen at the end of 2022. On the Asia-North America East Coast, the situation is less frequent and less severe.
Source of information – Sea Intelligence
