For most of the container era, the default Asia–Europe routing ran through the Suez Canal. That is not the prevailing pattern at the moment. A large share of Asia–Europe and Asia–Mediterranean services are routing around the Cape of Good Hope instead, adding roughly seven to fourteen days to the voyage and a corresponding amount of fuel and vessel time.
The practical consequence is not simply "everything is slower". It is that the planning assumptions embedded in a lot of procurement calendars are now wrong. If your reorder point was calculated on a 26-day port-to-port figure, and the sailing is now taking 33, you are structurally late on every order until someone updates the number. We see this repeatedly: the freight is performing exactly as the carrier said it would, and the buyer is still short of stock, because the two were never reconciled.
The second consequence is schedule reliability. A longer rotation means fewer round trips per vessel per year, which tightens effective capacity even when the nominal fleet has not changed. Tight capacity is what produces rolled bookings, and rolled bookings are what turn a predictable seven-day variance into a three-week one.
There are three sensible responses. The first is simply to re-baseline: take the current realistic range for your lane, add your own clearance and delivery time, and rebuild the reorder calendar around that number rather than the historic one. This costs nothing and solves most of the problem.
The second is to shift part of the volume to rail. China–Europe rail is unaffected by maritime routing and currently runs a substantially shorter transit than a Cape-routed sailing. It costs more than ocean and less than air, and it does not have the capacity to absorb everybody — which is precisely why the shippers who plan for it early get space and the ones who react late do not.
The third is to split shipments deliberately. Sending the bulk of an order by ocean and a smaller tranche by rail or air gives you a stock buffer arriving weeks ahead of the main consignment. It costs more per unit on the fast portion, but it is almost always cheaper than a stockout, and dramatically cheaper than airfreighting the whole order in a panic later.
What we would avoid is treating this as a temporary anomaly to be waited out. Routing patterns of this kind have persisted long enough to be a planning condition rather than a disruption. Build the current transit into the model, review it quarterly, and you remove most of the operational pain regardless of what the routing does next.
