Supply Chain Action Points
Read this first — the conclusion, and the moves to make:
- By 5 September, get every Panama surcharge in writing with three fields filled: USD per TEU, first effective date, expiry date. Any surcharge that arrives without an expiry goes up the chain as a base-rate change.
- Re-quote the Panama book per FEU rather than per TEU; USD 500 and USD 149 become USD 1,000 and USD 298 on a 40-foot, and a 200-FEU quarter carries a USD 140,400 spread, which is worth a tender.
- Ask each carrier for the maximum cargo weight per FEU it will accept after 1 October, when draft reaches 47.5 feet, and carry a written deadfreight assumption until that number arrives.
- Pull any September Panama shipment forward to a booking confirmed before 3 September, and place nothing new until the 15 September slot level has held for two consecutive weeks.
- Put a Panama review on 2 October, when both the second slot cut and the 47.5-foot draft are live, and reset the premium in your landed cost model from that date rather than from the announcement.
The Panama Canal Authority will trim daily transit slots from 36 to 34 from 3 September and to 32 from 15 September, with Neopanamax locks capped at nine sailings per day. Draft limits tighten to 48 feet from 2 September and 47.5 feet on 1 October. Carriers are already passing costs through: CMA CGM levies a USD 500/TEU Panama surcharge from 10 September and MSC USD 149/TEU from 12 September.
The Analysis
Thirty-six, thirty-four, thirty-two. The Panama Canal Authority will take two daily transit slots out of the system on 3 September and two more on 15 September, cap the Neopanamax locks at nine sailings a day, and tighten draft from 48 feet on 2 September to 47.5 feet on 1 October. Two carriers have already put a price on it: CMA CGM at USD 500 per TEU from 10 September, MSC at USD 149 per TEU from 12 September.
Same canal, same constraint, same fortnight. A factor of 3.4 between the two numbers.
That gap is the most useful figure in the announcement, and almost nobody has priced it.
The mechanism here is water, not demand. The canal is a lock system fed by a reservoir catchment, and a dry season reduces two things at once: the depth a hull can sit in, and the water every lockage spends. Draft falls first because it is the cheapest lever to pull. Slots fall second because the authority has to sell fewer transits to stop the queue from draining the reservoir. Both numbers in the announcement are outputs of the same input, which is why they move together, and why neither one on its own describes the capacity you are losing.
For a container shipper, the headline 36 to 34 is the wrong number to stare at. Those 36 daily slots are the whole canal, every vessel class, every lock. Container ships are Neopanamax, and Neopanamax is capped at nine a day. Nine out of thirty-four is roughly a quarter of the canal, and those nine are shared with LNG carriers, LPG carriers and the large bulkers that also need the wider locks. Read 34 as your quota and you overstate your own exposure several times over. Read nine, then ask what share of the nine your carrier actually holds, and the exposure turns into a number of sailings rather than a percentage.
The draft cut is the quieter one and, per box, the larger one. Half a foot is not a rounding error on a fully laden ship. Take a Neopanamax container vessel near the top of the lock's size range and assume 300 TEU of payload per foot of draft forgone, which is my assumption and not a figure from the source. Half a foot is 150 TEU a sailing that exists on paper and cannot be loaded. At nine neopanamax sailings a day, that is 1,350 TEU of daily capacity the slot count does not show you. The slot number tells you how many ships pass. The draft number tells you how empty each one leaves. Carriers publish the first and rarely volunteer the second, because a ship sailing 150 TEU light does not generate a press release.
Now the surcharges. USD 500 against USD 149, on overlapping lanes, in the same fortnight, for the same physical constraint. A genuine pass-through of a shared cost converges, because the cost is the same cost. These do not converge, and a 3.4 times spread is not noise around a market rate. Either the two carriers hold different slot positions and different contract books, so the amount of spot cargo they need to recover from differs, or one of them is not recovering a cost at all. From outside the tariff I cannot tell you which. Neither can the importer reading it, which is the point: a surcharge with no published formula is a price wearing a euphemism.
We do the arithmetic on a 40-foot box, which is two TEU. CMA CGM: USD 1,000 per FEU. MSC: USD 298 per FEU. Set that against a container holding USD 25,000 of goods, my assumption and not a sourced figure, and it is 4.0% of cargo value against 1.2%. The USD 702 difference on a single box is bigger than the customs brokerage line on most import files. Scale it to 200 FEU a quarter and it is USD 140,400 on a decision nobody made on purpose, because the surcharge arrived as a line item and was approved as a line item. On high-value cargo the percentage is small and the absolute is not. On heavy, low-value cargo the percentage is the whole conversation: 4% of value against a 6% gross margin is two thirds of the margin, spent on a canal routing the buyer never chose.
The impact splits by contract, not by company size. A shipper on an all-in rate with a pass-through clause pays nothing until renewal and then pays all of it at once. A shipper buying spot pays on the first invoice after 10 September and has no lever at all. Small importers live in the second group by construction, which is why one announcement reads as an annoyance to a big-box retailer and as a margin event to someone moving forty containers a year.
The calendar matters more than the percentages. Draft tightens 2 September, slots drop 3 September, the CMA CGM surcharge starts 10 September, MSC 12 September, the second slot cut lands 15 September, the second draft cut 1 October. The invoice moves before the physical constraint is fully in force. That is normal and worth remembering: you are paying for the canal's September before you have shipped through it.
Had the authority published only the slot numbers, most shippers would have modelled 36 minus 34 over 36, a 5.6% capacity cut, and shrugged. That number is real and survivable. What makes this a pricing event is that three constraints land inside four weeks and only one of them makes the headline. Multiply the slot cut by the draft deadfreight, then by the spread between two carriers pricing the same lock, and the effective increase on a Panama-routed FEU is not 5.6% of anything. It is a four-figure number per box.
What the coverage missed was not a scandal. It was a denominator. Nobody asked what nine out of thirty-four means for a container, nobody put the two surcharges side by side, and nobody converted 500 dollars a TEU into a share of the goods inside the box.
The line to lock is not the draft. It is the surcharge expiry. A Panama surcharge with no expiry date is a rate increase wearing a costume, and you should price it as one through the first quarter of 2027.
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