Container operations are due to resume at the Port of Liverpool on Monday 7^th November from 0600 hours.

Communication from the Workers Union has now confirmed a further period of strike action which will take place between 0600 Hrs Monday 14^th November through to 0600 Hrs on Monday 21^st November 2022.

The Unite union has said almost 600 port workers will walk out again from October 24 to November 7, following industrial action over recent weeks.

Current industrial action, which began on 11 October, is due to come to an end on 17 October.

Liverpool dockworkers are to stage a second walkout, from 11-17 October, after negotiations with the Peel Ports-operated terminal failed.

The Unite union announced the next strike with five days left of the current industrial action.

A new eight-day strike looms over pay at the UK’s largest container port, Felixstowe, threatening further disruption to imports as retailers stock up before Christmas.

The Unite union has announced the strike will begin at 7am on 27 September, and run until 6.59am on 5 October, after port workers rejected a 7% pay deal offered by management. It threatens to cause fresh disruption to UK supply chains after the shocks of Brexit and the Covid pandemic.

Dockworkers at the UK’s port of Liverpool have voted to strike over wages, threatening to slow trade flows and inflict more pain on a British economy already facing labor and logistics strains.

Liverpool, owned by Peel Ports, is Britain’s fourth-largest gateway for seaborne trade and a vital stop for transatlantic commerce. No timetable was specified, but any work stoppage will add to disruptions that are expected from an eight-day strike planned later this month at Felixstowe, the country’s busiest container terminal.

Talks at ACAS to avert a strike at the UK’s biggest container port, Felixstowe broke down last night, both sides blaming the other. There are no further meetings planned before the eight-day strike starts on 21 August, and shipping lines plan to reschedule calls at the port, some carriers looking at bringing ships in earlier to discharge UK imports.

Potential strike action could take place at Felixstowe port this month after the overwhelming majority of port workers balloted in favour of going ahead to cease operations.

Although no dates have been confirmed, and the negotiations between the Port and Unite are still ongoing, if the strikes go ahead this will cause considerable disruption to the port and its services and have a negative impact on UK supply chains.

In its latest Global Liner Performance report, Sea Intelligence says that up to December 2021, container shipping line schedule reliability dropped again, this time by -1.2 percentage points on a month-to-month basis to 32.0%; the lowest ever global schedule reliability since the maritime analysis company started the measurement in 2011.

On a year-to-year basis, schedule reliability was 12.5 percentage points lower, reports Sea-Intelligence. Despite the low schedule reliability in 2021, there has not been much fluctuation, with the global scores hovering between 32%-40% for the most part. The average delay for late vessel arrivals increased to 7.33 days, the fifth consecutive month with the delay figure above 7 days.

Among the world’s 14 largest container lines, Maersk had the highest reliability, with 46.2%. Maersk-owned Hamburg Süd came in second with 41%. MSC is third, followed by Hapag-Lloyd.

Five carriers had schedule reliability of under 20%, with Evergreen recording the lowest December 2021 schedule reliability figure of 14.3%. Asian container lines usually have low reliability rates as a large part of their business take place on the route to the USA via the Pacific Ocean which is the most strained route of all.

Things went from bad to worse for airfreight shippers and forwarders in Hong Kong, as the territory’s government banned more international routes in response to an increase in Covid-19 cases.

It announced flight bans from eight countries for two weeks, starting on Saturday, affecting all flights from the US, Canada, the UK, France, Australia, the Philippines, Pakistan and India.

And, in a separate announcement, the authorities barred flights from South Korea after three passengers tested positive for the virus on arrival from Seoul.

In less than six weeks, Hong Kong has imposed flight bans on 24 routes. The latest affect the likes of Air Canada, Air India and Philippines AirAsia, but Hong Kong-based Cathay Pacific has borne the brunt of these measures.

When the authorities tightened rules and voided quarantine-related exemptions for flight crews late last year, management announced it might be forced to merge passenger and cargo flight schedules, but after further restrictions on 30 December, the airline announced it was suspending all longhaul cargo flights – freighters and passenger aircraft deployed on cargo missions – for seven days.

Director of flight operations Chris Kempis explained that it was impossible to transition overnight to closed loop operations and that management needed time to consider all factors, including hotel availability for quarantined crews.

Cathay has announced the resumption of longhaul freighter flights, but at a seriously throttled-down level.

James Baker | Thursday, 09 December 2021

FELIXSTOWE, the UK’s largest container port, has had most vessel calls cancelled of any European port, as carriers seek to avoid those terminals affected by congestion.

Carriers are skipping port calls as they seek to avoid congestion and restore schedule reliability. Europe’s top ports all saw vessel calls decrease as schedules were revised

Figures from Alphaliner comparing actual ship calls with pro forma schedules for the period from July to December show that almost one third of Felixstowe’s calls were omitted.

“Our survey clearly shows that Felixstowe was worst hit by the temporary schedule changes and ad hoc adjustments,” Alphaliner said. “The top-three ports, Rotterdam, Antwerp and Hamburg, also saw a reduction of between 20.2% to 30.3% of planned calls. Smaller ports have fared much better.”

The 18 Asia–northern Europe loops operated by the three mega alliances skipped a total of 383 port calls in northern Europe over the past five months due to severe port congestion, it added.

The figure represents nearly a quarter of all scheduled calls in the period.

The addition of 77 ad hoc inducement calls had only partly compensated for these port omissions, Alphaliner said.

“The majority of inducement calls were made in the smaller ports of Wilhelmshaven (24), Bremerhaven (16), Le Havre (11) and Zeebrugge (8), which unsurprisingly posted the biggest growth in third-quarter traffic.”

Port calls were being omitted for a variety of reasons, it noted.

The first of these was ad hoc omissions of certain ports on specific voyages, to avoid congestion-related delays.

Others, however, were due to the temporary removal or transfer of calls for a period of time in an effort to restore schedule reliability.

“Many of these temporary adjustments have already been extended to March 2022 due to ongoing port congestion,” Alphaliner said.

But there were also a large number of blanked sailings which were caused by the late arrival of ships at ports of origin.

“This is especially the case for The Alliance’s ships, which continue to maintain the majority of their calls in Europe, thus leading to much longer round-voyage durations. The late arrival of ships in the Far East has forced Hapag-Lloyd, ONE, HMM and Yang Ming to regularly blank sailings.”

Carriers had also stopped doing double calls at some ports, on both the inbound and outbound voyage. This had been seen at Rotterdam, which recorded a 25% fall in scheduled calls.

At Felixstowe, which received only 104 of the 154 calls scheduled during the period, the number of calls from its key 2M alliance was reduced to just three in October, when UK import cargo on the AE7/Condor service was redirected to Wilhemshaven and Antwerp.

But the drop in Asia calls in the third quarter of this year did not affect container throughput at the top-three European ports, Rotterdam, Antwerp and Hamburg, in the period from January to September.

Rotterdam achieved container growth of 7.8% in the first nine months of the year to reach 11.5m teu, despite a 25.6% drop in Asia calls in the July-November period.

Antwerp, however, lost some market share as container traffic growth was limited to 2.8%, at 9.1m teu.

Hamburg, the third-busiest port in Europe, managed to increase liftings by 2.4% to 6.5m teu.

But Alphaliner noted that its smaller rivals at Bremerhaven and Wilhelmshaven had seen gains of 10% and 49% respectively, as carriers sought less crowded terminals.