Why Berth Delays Absorb 8.5% of the Box Fleet? Experts Explain

More than four million TEU now sit at berth, above the 2022 peak. That pile does not only lengthen a voyage. It takes ships out of rotation, breaks weekly strings, and turns a published schedule into a guess. Suez returns are putting some capacity back into the network at the same time. The two effects cancel each other on paper and leave shippers with slower, less reliable space.

Effective capacity is not published capacity

In a written reply to The Supply Chainer, Casper Ellerbaek, Executive Vice President and Global Head of Ocean Freight at DHL Global Forwarding, the logistics arm of DHL Group, drew the line between ships that exist and ships that can be used. Industry analysis, he said, shows about 8.5 percent of the global containership fleet - roughly three million TEU - absorbed by delays, against a pre-pandemic baseline near 2.2 percent. Suez rotations are shortening and releasing slots. Those slots do not become reliable space at once. Global schedule reliability has fallen below 50 percent. Late vessels now average almost seven days. Normalization, he wrote, will be gradual.

Eric Fullerton, VP of Data Insights at project44, a supply-chain visibility platform, made the same point from network data. Berth delays remove capacity even while ships keep trading. Fewer round voyages mean missed weekly sailings and knock-on waits at the next port. Project44 figures put China-to-Europe transit at 48.5 days and Southeast Asia-to-Europe at 44.5 days over the past twelve months. Time saved through Suez can vanish if the vessel then queues at a full gateway. Congestion rarely stays in one harbor. A late departure misses the next berth window or a transshipment cut-off and the delay travels with the ship.

What an ETA cannot show

Fraser Robinson, CEO and co-founder of Beacon, argued that the number on a tracking screen is the wrong object. An ETA does not say whether a box is refused at the origin terminal, waiting in an anchorage, or about to miss a connection. The useful questions are narrower: is the terminal taking boxes; has the sailing been cancelled or the allocation cut; how often has this carrier rolled cargo on this lane this season. For ships offshore, position, queue length, and berth drift matter. A vessel can berth into a full yard and sit days before discharge. Carriers may skip the call. Missed connections need both legs: the hub window, dwell, and whether the onward ship is itself late. Suez returns are changing port rotations, so a spring connection may no longer hold. Linking tracking to purchase orders and lane records, he wrote, is how shippers see which boxes actually matter.

Where the next wave lands

Ellerbaek named Shanghai and Ningbo as the clearest Asian pressure points, with low reliability from volume, bunching, and weather. Delayed departures then arrive in waves at transshipment and destination ports. In Northern Europe he flagged Rotterdam, Antwerp-Bruges, and Hamburg as services return to the shorter Suez routing. The risk is concentrated peaks on yards and inland networks that are already tight. Fullerton added Asian transshipment hubs - Singapore, Port Klang, Tanjung Pelepas - and the same Northern European trio, already among the most congested in project44’s set. If Suez holds, those ports take the extra arrivals. If it does not, they take the diversion. Either way the squeeze is there.

The bottleneck has moved from ocean miles to time at the quay. Until that time shortens, extra ships on a schedule will not feel like extra capacity.