In a revealing analysis, Sea-Intelligence reports that despite significant consolidation in the container-shipping industry, the disparity between the most and least reliable major carriers has grown markedly since 2016. This widening performance gap indicates that, even as the number of global players has fallen, service reliability has become far less uniform.
Reliability divergence deepens in 2025
Using a three-month rolling average of schedule-reliability scores among the top-20 carriers worldwide, Sea-Intelligence traced the divergence in performance. From 2011 to 2016 the gap between top and bottom carriers narrowed — a time when the industry was grappling with overcapacity and fierce price competition. But post-2016, the trend reversed: the gap widened significantly, reaching new highs during the pandemic upheavals, and remaining elevated through 2024-25.
What this means for shippers is that today they face a wider spectrum of service-quality choices than they did a decade ago. Carriers that once converged on similar reliability levels now offer very different levels of on-time performance and delay risk — making the carrier-selection decision more critical than ever. Interestingly, this diversification has increased even though the number of major carriers has decreased via mergers and acquisitions — showing that consolidation has not led to identical service levels.
For cargo owners and logistics planners, this shift underscores the importance of more granular carrier-performance monitoring and contract structuring. Rather than treating all “top carriers” as interchangeable, they now must recognise that reliability is a key differentiator — and build this into routing, scheduling and contingency planning. The findings suggest that when service levels diverge so widely, the cost of a slower or less-reliable carrier can extend beyond delay fees to reputational and downstream supply-chain impacts.
In short: the industry is no longer heading toward a “lowest common denominator” of reliability; instead, shipping lines are diverging — some pulling ahead with superior performance, others lagging further behind. For shippers, that means the choice of carrier matters more than ever.
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Source: Sea-Intelligence
