Sea-Intelligence have used their Blank Sailings Tracker to look at how the carriers were reacting (in terms of blanking sailings) to the collapse of demand, especially of the imports to North America and Europe.
Figure 1 shows a snapshot of the additional blank sailings that were announced (or unannounced ones that were captured by Sea-Intelligence) for the week 42-52 period in the past 2 weeks. In simpler terms, they looked at the blank sailings for week 42-52 as of week 42 and as of week 44 (the last week at the time of writing).
"Basically what we see here is that the number of blank sailings have been ramped up drastically on the Transpacific, but not so much on Asia-Europe. There have been 34 additional blank sailings on Asia-North America West Coast, and 16 on Asia-North America East Coast. For the former, carriers have announced an extra 7-11 blank sailings in all but 5 weeks of the analysed period. However, for weeks 51 and 52, carriers have scheduled no blank sailings on Asia-North America West Coast, which is a reflection of the carriers’ indecision as to how to approach the potential pre-Chinese New Year rush. It appears more to be a wait-and-see approach, in terms of whether there will be a seasonal demand spike.
"On Asia-Europe however, we don’t see a similar trend, with Asia-North Europe only seeing an additional 6 blank sailings, and Asia-Mediterranean seeing an additional 4 blank sailings."
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