North America monthly reader - December
Uncertainty. And opportunity. As the sun sets on 2024 and 2025 gets ready.
North America - Big Worries, Bigger Opportunities
To download our latest SRS publication from October 3rd, featuring detailed insights from the Q3 2024 eeSea Schedule Reliability Scorecard, click here.
Introduction
Welcome to our December update, where we delve into the region’s most significant events. We welcome your feedback and are available for in-depth discussions based on our data.
An unsteady finish?
While it’s not hard to paint a grim picture of uncertainty with key events from the past month, namely the Canadian strikes and ongoing failure of negotiations between the ILA & USMX, we have not witnessed weakened productivity on the North American trade. On the contrary, it’s one of the few global trades that consistently showed reliability improvement and growing demand in Q2 and Q3 this year - especially in West Coast gateway ports. We look forward to diving further into that with our release of the Q4 2024 Schedule Reliability Scorecard in early January.
It’s true that lingering delays from the Vancouver, Rupert, and Montreal strikes have necessitated a period of closely monitored stabilization that will likely stretch through the end of January, but this is not poised to impact the steady flow of expected capacity. There are also no notable upticks in blank sailings or omissions scheduled for December or January beyond the expected Lunar New Year blanks at this time.
Concerns at the forefront of everyone’s minds include what is now referred to as the ‘inevitable’ ILA strike, and how these disruptions could increase pressure on the West Coast while causing a dip in reliability and scheduled capacity along East & Gulf Coast ports. At this time, we have seen little to no indications of carriers making preliminary strategic schedule adjustments in order to curb these risks. This is well aligned with the fact that most carriers did not implement sweeping measures to avert delays until work stoppages were well underway in Canada in the beginning of November.
The lack of knee-jerk reactions to this grim outlook suggest that profits to be made on this competitive trade far outweigh the potential setbacks of another strike. Politically motivated adaptations to a different landscape in 2025 are already underway with shippers busily front-loading ahead of Trump’s inauguration and his proposed tariffs, in addition to the usual pre-Lunar New Year rush.
Last but certainly not least, there is the matter of new networks and the optimistic promise of improved reliability that comes hand-in-hand with an unavoidable (but hopefully brief) period of transitional chaos. More on that below.
A fresh start
These past few weeks we’ve been putting renewed effort into creating more original eeSea content. This has been accompanied by the goal of including relevant links to eeSea datasets for third-party content that we post in our News page. We are calling these links ‘eeSea Signals’ and hope that it will help our users and the general public to contextualize key industry information they read here.
In the interest of keeping things as simple as possible for our readers during the holiday season and avoiding redundancy, we invite you to check out the detailed analysis of both Gemini and Premier Alliance vessel voyages in our recent eeSea posts.
While we published the first clues to Gemini’s vessel schedules as early as November 27th, we followed it up with a more extensive exploration of the current landscape just last week. Similarly, we got a lead in breaking the news of ONE’s first Premier voyages on December 4th, but provided a more in-depth assessment today after spending a few days stitching together the details in our database.
There is no original eeSea publication covering MSC’s latest E/W network updates from November 27th, but we have taken great care to quickly implement the information communicated in that advisory, as well as to incorporate eeSea Signals for impacted services.
You can follow our ongoing updates to these E/W networks live through Tableau and our web-app, but you are also welcome to reach out to our team and request a copy of our internal service details summary for Gemini Cooperation and Premier Alliance (updated daily).
As always, thank you for reading - happy holidays and see you all in 2025!
Kind regards,
Destine
