Shipping lines have become slightly more punctual with their schedules. The February Global Liner Performance (GLP) report from supply chain consulting firm Sea-Intelligence showed a 3.6 percentage point (pp) month-over-month improvement in overall schedule reliability, reaching 54.9% , the highest level since May 2024.
On a year-on-year basis, the score for the second month of this year was 1.8 percentage points higher.
The report indicated that Maersk was the most reliable airline among the top 13 in February 2025, with a schedule reliability of 60.2 percent, followed by MSC at 57.4 percent and Hapag-Lloyd at 57.3 percent.
“Two new carrier alliances, Gemini Cooperation and Premier Alliance, were launched in February 2025, while 2M and THE Alliance will be gradually dismantled in the coming months. Ocean Alliance will continue to operate as before. While MSC is not an alliance, its sole participation in east-west trades and the vastness of its operating network in both directions make it essential to consider it in an alliance context,” according to the Sea-Intelligence report.
In line with this context, Gemini Cooperation recorded a schedule reliability of 94.0% at home ports in February 2025 , followed by MSC with 79.6% and Premier Alliance with 60.4%. Ocean Alliance recorded a schedule reliability of 54.1%, while THE Alliance and 2M achieved 45.3% and 44.2%, respectively.
“It’s worth noting that the new alliances are in the initial phase of network deployment, and their full rollout won’t be completed until July 2025, at which point it will be possible to truly assess their performance. However, it’s interesting to observe their performance in initial arrivals at ports of origin,” the Sea-Intelligence report stated.
APM Terminals Lázaro Cárdenas and trust in Gemini Cooperation
In the wake of the first month of operation (February) of the Gemini Cooperation alliance between Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd, the APM Terminals port terminal in the port of Lázaro Cárdenas , in the state of Michoacán, Mexico, has launched a “simultaneous transshipment connection,” the only one of its kind in the world.
This is a double transshipment maneuver of the TP 11 and TP 15 services of Gemini Cooperation in which an average of two thousand 500 20-foot containers (TEU) in total are unloaded at the terminal every weekend so that half of them board the other ship that will take them to their final destination, after having set sail from different ports in Asia (mainly China) to reach other points in America.
“The more predictable we are about shipping lines’ itineraries, the better we as terminals can prepare to receive ships, service them as quickly as possible, plan resources, and more,” said Beatriz Yera, general manager of APM Terminals in Mexico, in an interview with T21.
According to the board, this new service took months of preparation and so far has gone according to plan .
The promoters of the port of Lázaro Cárdenas, the second busiest commercial port on Mexico’s Pacific coast, seek to transform it into a regional maritime hub where goods can converge and from there be distributed to other points in the Americas, either by sea or land.
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