Inventory days vs ocean transit days
Every sector carries a different amount of buffer stock, and every shipping route takes a different amount of time. Plot the two together and a routine delay in one sector is invisible, while the same delay in another means the shelf is empty before the replacement ship has even left port.
Every sector has one fixed inventory-days value and every route has one fixed transit-days value, so this is the full 8×8 grid of combinations, not a sample: each cell is one sector on one route, shaded by whether that sector’s average inventory would outlast a clean shipment on that route, and whether it would also outlast a Red Sea-scale delay on top. The number in each cell is the buffer, inventory days minus transit days.
Matrix of sector inventory days versus route transit days
Eight sectors by eight ocean freight routes. Each cell shows the buffer in days between that sector's average inventory and that route's transit time, colour-coded red, amber or green. A data table with the same values follows.
Rows: sectors, leanest average inventory at top. Columns: routes, shortest transit on the left.
| Sector | Inventory days | Route | Transit days | Zone |
|---|
Source & method
Inventory days: Damodaran / NYU Stern Working Capital Ratios by Sector (US, January 2026 edition), which reports Inventory as a percent of Sales for 120+ industries. Inventory days here is approximated as (Inventory / Sales) × 365. That is a common shorthand, not textbook Days Sales of Inventory, which divides by cost of goods sold rather than sales; treat these as order-of-magnitude, not to the decimal, and expect real days-inventory-outstanding figures (which use COGS) to run somewhat higher.
Transit days: the "Direct" column, midpoint of the published range, from Freight Academy’s Sea Freight Transit Times reference table (an editorially compiled, non-carrier reference page, last updated 1 February 2026), cross-checked against UNCTAD’s Review of Maritime Transport commentary on current routing and speeds. These are schedule reference estimates, not the live, AIS-verified traffic on the chokepoints page; port congestion, customs, transshipment and pre/post carriage all add time on top and are not included.
The shock line: +12 days on top of plain transit, the middle of the 10 to 14 extra days that same source (and the Cape of Good Hope’s own detour distance, about 7,000 nautical miles) attributes to a Red Sea diversion around the Cape rather than through Suez, the routing most carriers have used since the Houthi attacks began in late 2023. It is a stylised, single number applied to every route for comparability, not a route-specific forecast; an actual chokepoint closure can add anywhere from days (Suez, 2021) to a sustained multi-year diversion (Red Sea, since 2023).
- Sector inventory is a national average across an entire industry; your own company, or your own SKU, can sit well above or below it, which is exactly the gap this page’s CTA is for.
- Route transit is sea-leg only, port to port. It excludes trucking, rail, customs clearance and any pre-shipment production lead time, all of which add real days on top.
- Eight sectors and eight routes is a curated, illustrative set chosen for a spread of both variables, not an exhaustive matrix of global trade.
- The chart above is the complete 8×8 grid, every sector against every route, not a sample of real shipments; that is intentional, not a rendering artefact. Each sector has exactly one inventory-days value and each route exactly one transit-days value, which is why cells line up into rows and columns instead of scattering.
Licence: this page and its derived CSV are CC BY 4.0. Underlying data © Aswath Damodaran / NYU Stern (working capital ratios) and respective carriers / UNCTAD (transit times), used under their public terms.