Sea-Intelligence: Port Power Rankings

While a straight average across monthly schedule reliability for each port across the 14-year time-period is one approach, it assigns an equal measure of importance to schedule reliability performance in 2012 as it does 2025.

Recent results are more indicative of future performance. As such, to account for recency, Alan Murphy CEO of Sea-Intelligence assigned a higher weight to schedule reliability performance in 2025 and lowered the weight as we went down to 2012.

 The more port calls in a month, the more chances there are for something to go wrong, which makes maintaining a higher reliability figure that much more difficult. Figure 1 shows the port-level schedule reliability “power ranking” when accounting for both recency and port call volume. 

Santa Marta in Colombia comes out as the most reliable deep-sea port, with 94.5% schedule reliability. Looking at geographies, 12 of the top-20 ports in the ranking are from Central and South America, while 6 are from Europe, and none from Asia.

In fact, of the 20 most-called global ports, the average rank is 124^th out 202 of analysed ports, while the average reliability is 60.3%. The first port from Asia is 23^rd in the ranking, while the first port in North America is 51^st on the list. Shanghai is 169^th, Singapore is 145^th, Los Angeles is 124^th, Long Beach is 155^th, and Rotterdam is 106^th. Apart from Tanjung Pelepas at 46^th, none of the top-20 most called ports even cracked the top 60 in the rankings. 

“This goes to show that the most well-connected ports within the global deep-sea trades are also some of the most unreliable. And while this is not entirely the fault of the port, as schedule reliability is largely dictated by the vessel, it is still a relevant metric of port performance,” said Murphy.