THE ‘TRADITIONAL’ blank sailings that normally accompany China’s Golden Week holiday do not seem to have occurred in the Australasian trade this year but port congestion, bad weather and dockyard delays have spawned several schedule slides and/or port omissions.
Carrier sources say lines were ‘striking while the iron is hot’ amidst signs the China-ANZ peak season may be ending, as bookings and rates for coming weeks are slowing markedly. A backlog of cargo at Chinese main ports has been largely cleared by extra-loaders and by lines maintaining ‘normal’ schedules rather than blanking one or two sailings. DCN has detected only one Golden Week blanking, by the CAT service.
But delays have also been compounding, causing vessel bunching at both ends of the trade, and bad weather has also played its part in putting schedules askew.
The A3 consortium of ANL, Cosco SL and OOCL has announced one-week slides for two of its loops, with A3N to slip a week after V231S/231N of CMA CGM Zingaro, late October-early November. The delayed redelivery from drydock in Zhoushan of OOCL Shanghai has also caused delays and forced a position swap with CMA CGM Setosha.
The A3S schedule is also sliding one week, from V140S/140N of OOCL Italy also late October-early November) and consortium members have agreed to omit some Xiamen calls and alter the Australian port rotation on some A3C voyages “in order to mitigate further disruption”.
South East Asian hub congestion is also still causing delays, with the KIX/NZS service sliding one week from V236/237 of Kota Lembah and port omissions notified for the GAC/AAX-S and EAC/AAX-E services.
