The Red Sea crisis has forced shipping lines to sail around the Cape of Good Hope, increasing sailing distances and de facto increasing transit times as well, Sea-Intelligence notes.
According to Sea-Intelligence, care must be taken while looking into transit times, as headline grabbing numbers may be technically feasible, but often come with a caveat; they are on uncompetitive port-pairs that are not marketed by carriers as such. For an apples-to-apples comparison, we need to look at the shortest actual transit times for a port-pair i.e., the minimum transit time.
As such, from the two sub-regions of Asia (North & South East Asia) and to the three sub-regions of Mediterranean (East, West, & Central MED), the average minimum transit time in the three months since the crisis (January-March 2024) increased by 39%, Sea-Intelligence notes.
This is compared to a six-month baseline (July-December 2023), counted across the four most-connected port-pairs across each region pair. Asia-North Europe fared better in that respect, as the increase was lower at 15%, Sea-Intelligence finds. In a nutshell, what this means is that the most competitive transit time increased on average by 39% on Asia-MED and by 15% on Asia-NEUR.
Figure 1 shows this broken down into the sub-region combinations. As explained by Sea-Intelligence, the four most impacted subregion-pairs connect to East and Central Mediterranean, which makes sense, because those connections had the longest detour.
The average minimum transit time increased by 61%-63% to East Mediterranean and by 39%-40% to Central Mediterranean. For North Europe, connections to the Baltics had the smallest impact on transit times from the Red Sea crisis, with the average minimum transit time increasing by 7%-11%.
