How canceled sailings will impact US ports - and when

Blank-sailings data is a key leading indicator for U.S. ports, cargo shippers, truckers and railways. A container ship that doesn’t depart from Asia equates to a container ship that doesn’t arrive on the U.S. West Coast two to three weeks later, or on the East Coast four to five weeks later.

What matters to American businesses is U.S. port arrivals, not foreign departures. American businesses want to know exactly how much arrival capacity will be reduced, exactly when it will be reduced, and how this reduced capacity will compare year-on-year.

Copenhagen-based eeSea — a platform founded in 2016 that maps container-industry schedules — has provided a snapshot of this U.S.-arrivals-centric data on blank sailings to FreightWaves.

The latest information, updated on Sunday, shows changes to headhaul capacity from Asia to North America, as well as changes to mainline capacity to individual U.S. ports. Taken together, this data offers the clearest publicly available picture yet of how the coronavirus is affecting the container-shipping network that supplies America.