How Did the Major Shipping Lines Perform in July?
If you’ve got containers moving around the world, there’s a good chance you’ve experienced a late vessel recently.
Sea-Intelligence has released its latest Global Liner Performance report for July 2026, and the numbers aren't particularly encouraging.
Global schedule reliability fell to just 56.4% in July, down 6.1 percentage points from June. That makes July the least reliable month of 2026 so far, and the lowest level recorded since February 2025.
And importantly, this is a global measure. It isn't looking at one particular trade or region. The report measures the performance of the major container shipping lines across their global networks.
So, how did your shipping line perform?
Maersk - 73.7%
Hapag-Lloyd - 69.3%
MSC - 59.9%
CMA CGM - 57.8%
ZIM - 52.0%
COSCO - 50.3%
OOCL - 50.1%
HMM - 46.4%
Evergreen - 46.4%
ONE - 46.1%
Yang Ming - 45.4%
PIL - 43.1%
Wan Hai - 29.8%
Maersk was the only carrier to achieve schedule reliability above 70%, while Hapag-Lloyd was the only other carrier above 60%.
At the other end of the scale, Wan Hai recorded just 29.8%, meaning fewer than one in three vessels arrived within the measure of schedule reliability.
But perhaps the more telling figure is what happened when vessels were late.
The average delay for vessels that arrived late increased to 6.06 days, the highest level since January 2024.
And that’s where the headline percentage starts to become much more meaningful. Schedule reliability is measured against the carrier’s published schedule. In simple terms, it asks: Did the vessel arrive when the carrier said it would?
In July, increasingly, the answer was no.
There was also no improvement across the board. Not one of the 13 carriers measured improved month on month in July. MSC recorded the largest monthly decline, falling 11.9 percentage points.
Looking back over 12 months, the picture isn't much better. None of the 13 carriers recorded an improvement year on year, with Wan Hai recording the largest decline at 24.4 percentage points.
Of course, there will always be debate around how schedule reliability is measured, and a single monthly figure doesn't tell the whole story.
But when a vessel arrives six days late, it matters.