Six of 10 European ports including Rotterdam, Hamburg and the U.K.’s Felixstowe were flashing orange on a heat map compiled by Flexport this month. (That’s second-worst on a scale of green, yellow, orange and black.)

Two of 10 American ports — Houston and Charleston — were also flagged orange, while Los Angeles and Long Beach were the only ones rated the worst. Out of all 20, the only two shaded green as the least congested were New York and Savannah.

According to data from project44, the average shipment delay from China to the U.S. West Coast increased 114% in 2021 compared with a year earlier. The route to Europe, by comparison, recorded a 172% surge. (Click here for the latest on Asia’s shipping challenges.)

The transportation snags are system-wide, and inland trucking and rail networks are struggling to keep up.

Another Flexport gauge shows the time it takes seaborne cargo to go from Asia to Europe — from exporter’s loading dock to the destination port’s exit gate — rose close to an all-time high in mid-February and was almost double the journey’s time in 2019. About 23% of vessels arrived on schedule in December, down from more than 40% in December 2020.

Hapag-Lloyd apparently sees an opportunity. The world’s No. 5 container carrier is launching an express service linking China and Germany starting April 1, connecting Dachan Bay in South China with Hamburg with a 27-day transit time.

Andreas Buetfering, Hapag-Lloyd’s senior director of trade management for the Far East, said in the press release that the weekly service “pays attention to addressing the current market challenges.”

And Maersk this week is promoting full operations for intermodal service it says can transport goods in less than 20 days from Busan, South Korea, via Trans-Siberian rail to the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad and then elsewhere in the Baltic region. That compares with a 60-day ocean voyage through the Suez Canal.

The new service “comes at the perfect time to help ease current logistics woes to move goods shipped from the Far East to Europe,” said Zsolt Katona, Maersk’s managing director for Eastern Europe.

—Brendan Murray in London