Supply Chain Action Points
Read this first — the conclusion, and the moves to make:
- Re-base every lane budget from the 6% headline to the 10.8% transpacific rate implied by the 60/21/19 split under equal lane weights, and have the corrected number approved before the window closes on 27 September.
- Book transpacific volume at least 21 days before ETD between now and 27 September instead of the usual 14, so that a blanked sailing leaves one full rebooking cycle rather than none.
- Put a seven-day slip into every customer promise on transpacific lanes through Week 39, quoting 42 days where you currently quote 35, and tell the accounts affected before they read it in a tracking update.
- Identify the 20% of SKUs with the thinnest safety stock and pre-position one extra week of cover on all of them by 27 September; two blanks in one month exhaust 21 days of cover and force the difference onto air.
- Track blank announcements week by week against your own booking list rather than against the 6% average; the only number that changes a decision is how many of your booked sailings appeared on the cancellation list.
Drewry expects 49 cancelled sailings across main East-West lanes between Week 35 and Week 39 (Aug 24-Sep 27), about 6% of scheduled capacity. The transpacific takes roughly 60% of the cuts, with Asia-North Europe/Mediterranean at 21% and transatlantic 19%. Although ~94% of sailings still operate, concentrated cancellations can delay departures a week and tighten peak-season space for urgent bookings.
The Analysis
Six per cent is a number built to reassure. It is also the average of three cuts that have almost nothing in common, and the one that applies to you is close to double it.
Drewry expects 49 cancelled sailings across the main East-West lanes between Week 35 and Week 39, which runs 24 August to 27 September, about 6% of scheduled capacity. The transpacific takes roughly 60% of the cuts, Asia to north Europe and the Mediterranean 21%, the transatlantic 19%. Around 94% of sailings still operate. The release notes that concentrated cancellations can delay a departure by a week and tighten peak-season space for urgent bookings.
Forty-nine is the only number in that paragraph that is not a percentage, so I will start there and rebuild the denominator the release did not give me.
49 divided by 6% gives a scheduled base of roughly 817 sailings across the five-week window. That denominator is not in the release. I reconstructed it, and everything below depends on it. 817 over five weeks is about 163 a week across the three lane groups, or 23 a day.
The split then stops being a set of percentages and becomes traffic. The transpacific takes 60% of the cuts, which is about 29 sailings. Asia to north Europe and the Mediterranean takes 21%, about 10. The transatlantic takes 19%, about 9. Those three add back to 49, which is the only reason I am willing to build on them.
Now the lane rates. If the three groups carried equal scheduled capacity, which is my assumption and not a figure from the release, you get 29 divided by 272, or 10.8%, on the transpacific; 10 divided by 272, or 3.8%, on Asia to north Europe and the Mediterranean; and 9 divided by 272, or 3.4%, on the transatlantic. Average those three and you land on 6.0%, which is precisely the headline. That is not proof. It is the strongest available evidence that the 6% is a weighted mean sitting on top of three very different events, and nobody books a weighted mean. You book one lane, one sailing, one week.
The 94% is the other denominator problem, and it is the one that has been used to calm people down. Ninety-four per cent of sailings still operating sounds like reassurance until you ask what the missing 6% were. A blanked sailing is chosen, not suffered. The carrier pulls the deployment with the weakest book, and the weakest book is disproportionately the one carrying the lowest-rate cargo, which is disproportionately the shipper who booked late and at spot. A blank is not weather. It is a selection, made by someone with a rate sheet in front of them.
That selection runs against the small shipper twice over. You are more likely to be standing on the sailing that gets pulled, and when yours is pulled you rebook into a window that is already 10.8% thinner on your lane. The average is 6%. Your experience is not, and the gap between the two is not bad luck. It is the design.
Timing makes it sharper rather than softer. The window closes on 27 September, which is Week 39, and the cuts are spread across the final three weeks of the peak booking period for fourth-quarter arrivals. Capacity is being removed at the exact moment removing it is most valuable to the carrier, because a blanked sailing in a soft week costs the same slot and earns nothing. This is not a supply accident that happened to a schedule. It is a supply decision with a calendar attached to it.
What a week is worth, measured in something other than money. A seven-day slip on a planned thirty-day order-to-shelf cycle is 23% of the cycle, and thirty days is my assumption for the cycle, not a figure from the release. If you hold 21 days of safety stock cover, one blank eats a third of it. Two blanks on the same lane in the same month and you are out of cover before the second vessel is loaded, which means you are air-freighting the difference, which means the freight line and the expedite line are the same line and nobody has told finance they were ever separate.
Here is the part the summaries left out, and it is not the lane split. A blanked sailing is a re-quote event before it is a delay. The release says space tightens for urgent bookings. It does not say what happens to the rate on a booking that has to move regardless. Space that tightens is space that gets repriced, and the repricing lands on the shipper whose cargo must travel in that window rather than the shipper whose cargo can wait for the next one. The delay is visible in every tracking dashboard, which is why everyone discusses it. The repricing is visible only on the invoice three weeks later, in a line item nobody maps back to a vessel that did not sail. One of those two costs is on your P&L this quarter. The other is on your P&L next quarter, and by then nobody remembers which sailing it was.
Run the counterfactual, because it is where the planning error lives. Plan for seven days and you will get seven days plus the rebooking queue, since every booking on your vessel is competing for the same remaining slots in the same five-week window. The realised delay is the tail, not the mean, and the tail is what your customer experiences. A seven-day plan is not a plan for a seven-day event. It is a plan for the best case of a seven-day event, and the best case requires that nobody else got blanked on the same day you did.
The small account. Twelve FEU a month on the transpacific is my assumption. If your forwarder puts you on two sailings a month, that is 24 placements a year. Against a 10.8% lane cut, two or three of those placements a year land on a blanked sailing. Two or three service failures a year, if your promise carries no buffer. That is not a crisis and I am not going to dress it up as one. It is a pattern, and patterns are cheaper to fix than incidents.
Which is exactly why I would not renegotiate anything on the 6%. The number is real, it is honest, and it is an average over a network you do not ship on. The number you can act on is 10.8% on the transpacific. The number you cannot act on at all is which of those 29 sailings will be the ones pulled, because that information is released after you have committed your volume and paid your deposit.
So the lock is on volume, not on the sailing. You cannot buy certainty about which departure survives. You can buy the right to be rebooked into the next one at the rate you already agreed, and that is a clause, not a rate. The 6% will not tell you when to sign it. Week 39 will.
The carriers are not cancelling capacity. They are cancelling the capacity that was cheapest to cancel, and the only question worth asking is whether the cheap capacity was yours. Lock the volume before 27 September, because after that the window reopens and everyone who got blanked is bidding in it at the same time, at whatever the next quote says.
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