SIMIC

WITH the upcoming Golden Week holiday in Asia in early October 2034, as factories close, and container demand to and from Asia declines, shipping lines respond by blanking sailings to match supply with the lower demand, writes Sea-Intelligence.

However, when we initially looked at the 2023 Golden Week blanked capacity - two weeks ago in issue 629 of the Sea-Intelligence Sunday Spotlight - the carriers had not scheduled blank sailings even close to what was required, to match the blanked percentages of pre-pandemic years.



Fast forward 2 weeks to this week, and 29 additional blank sailings have been scheduled on the Transpacific, and 18 more on Asia-Europe.



Scheduled capacity reductions on Asia-North America West Coast went from 3.7 per cent to 14.1 per cent, from 2.2 per cent to 16.1 per cent on Asia-North America East Coast, from 6.8 per cent to 19.9 per cent on Asia-North Europe, and from 7.7 per cent to 21.0 per cent on Asia-Mediterranean. This means that carriers are now on track to blank capacity in line with both 2019 and the 2017-2019 average.



Alan Murphy, CEO, Sea-Intelligence, commented: "Two weeks ago, we effectively saw no Golden Week capacity reductions, as the scheduled capacity was far above what we had seen in the pre-pandemic period. What has happened over the past two weeks: A massive reduction in scheduled capacity, due to a large number of "last minute" blank sailings.



"The percentage of blanked capacity on Asia-North Europe, across the 4-week period, is now at 19.9 per cent, which is higher than the 2017-2019 period."