Ocean contracts can't enforce reliability, BCOs told

Schedule reliability across the top 13 container lines stood at just 50.6% in September, and shippers have no contractual way to force carriers to do better. That was the blunt message from Schneider Electric's Jaya Moorthi at TOC Asia in Singapore.

Sea-Intelligence's figures show a marginal improvement — up 0.9 percentage points from August — but only after three consecutive months of decline. The spread between carriers is stark. Maersk led the field at 64.8% reliability; Wan Hai sat at the bottom with 26.7%.

What does this change for shippers?

Very little, and that's the problem. Moorthi, VP Logistics for International Ops covering MEA, South Asia, the Pacific and India at Schneider Electric, doesn't see the needle moving.

"I begin to think that ocean freight reliability will not improve much anymore. It's going to be 50%, 55%, 60% at best," he said.

His reasoning is simple: since the Covid pandemic began roughly seven years ago, every year has delivered a fresh crisis. "Every year something will happen — there will be a reason why reliability gets bad," Moorthi said. "I haven't seen a carrier who comes and sits down and says, 'I will seek to do better.'"

In his framing, the commercial reality is bare: "Ocean business is going to be a case where you book with a carrier and they will do their best for the price." No guaranteed transit times, no penalty clauses that bite. "I haven't seen a BCO that actually enforces it," he said. "Ocean freight is becoming a very unenforceable contract over time."

Vincent Chew, consultant for container shipping markets at Drewry Shipping Consultants, agreed that performance clauses are a dead end in the current market. "Performance would be hard to put into contracts at this point in time, reliability is low," he said.

De-risking is the only playbook

Drewry's advice to its BCO clients is blunt: stop trying to contract your way out and start de-risking instead.

Moorthi laid out the arithmetic. If reliability is running at 50% but you need an effective 70%, you compensate by holding more inventory in the destination country or region as a buffer. That buffer works — and it costs.

"There is cost to this resilience, and this cost is going to pass onto the customer," he said. In other words, the carrier's missed sailings eventually show up as working capital on the shipper's balance sheet and as prices on the end customer's bill.

He called the situation an "enormous challenge" for BCOs, with no contractual remedy in sight.

Multimodal as a workaround

One escape route Schneider Electric has actually used: shifting freight off pure ocean routings onto multimodal alternatives, particularly where port congestion or severe weather is dragging transit times.

Congestion has been a significant issue at major Chinese ports this year, and weather disruptions have added their own delays. Multimodal routings have cut some Schneider Electric transits from 60 days to 42 — a 30% reduction. "We did quite a lot in 2026, to be honest," Moorthi said.

The event itself, TOC Asia, ran November 10–11, 2026 at Marina Bay Sands, connecting the port and terminal industry across the APAC region.

The forward view is sobering. With reliability stuck near the halfway mark, no enforceable performance terms, and resilience costs flowing downstream to customers, BCOs face a structural choice: pay for inventory buffers, redesign routings around multimodal — or accept that half their boxes won't arrive on schedule.