Maersk and CMA CGM Cascade New Peak Season Surcharges Across Asia-Europe and Transpacific Routes

The Analysis

Maersk filed a revised peak season surcharge of 1,000 dollars per 20ft and 2,000 per 40ft on Far East Asia to the US and Canada, effective June 17. It filed a second one, 750 per 20ft and 1,500 per 40ft, on Far East Asia to North Europe and the Mediterranean, effective July 7. CMA CGM put a PSS of 500 dollars per TEU on China to West Africa from June 15, a further PSS to East and South Africa from June 21, and a new set of FAK rates from Asia to North Europe and the Mediterranean from July 1. MSC went to 6,000 dollars per 40ft on Asia-North Europe and 6,500 on Asia-West Med from June 15. ONE filed 500 to 600 dollars per 20ft.

Five dates, four carriers, three different units. That is the story, and it is not the sentence at the end of the summary about a tightening market. A mood does not carry an effective date. A surcharge does.

So we build a calendar, then a landed cost per 40ft, then we price the window. Two of the five dates are already behind us as of today, June 18: June 15 and June 17 are live and sitting on invoices. Three are ahead, and the nearest is three days out. The arithmetic below says one email asking which date the surcharge keys off is worth more than a month of rate negotiation. That is not a figure of speech. It is 540,000 dollars on a 180-FEU book, and I show the working.

Start with the calendar, because everything else hangs off it. Two of the five dates are already live. June 15: CMA CGM's 500 dollars per TEU on China to West Africa, and MSC's FAK of 6,000 dollars per 40ft on Asia-North Europe and 6,500 on Asia-West Med. June 17: Maersk's transpacific PSS at 1,000 and 2,000. If you shipped on or after those dates, the money is on an invoice already, and this week's job is checking rather than planning.

Three dates are ahead. June 21, three days out: CMA CGM's PSS to East and South Africa. July 1, thirteen days out: CMA CGM's new FAK rates from Asia to North Europe and the Mediterranean. July 7, nineteen days out: Maersk's 750 and 1,500 on the same trades. ONE's 500 to 600 per 20ft appears in the summary without a date attached, so get the date before you do anything at all with it.

Note what the ladder actually is. It is not one increase. It is five steps over twenty-two days, across three trades, quoted in three units. Anybody describing it as a single market move has already discarded the only part you can act on.

Now the units, because this is where importers lose money without noticing. Maersk quotes per box: 750 on a 20ft, 1,500 on a 40ft. CMA CGM quotes West Africa per TEU at 500 dollars, and a 40ft box is two TEU. The West Africa surcharge on a 40ft is therefore 1,000 dollars, not 500. If your quotation sheet shows a round 500 against a 40ft booking, somebody read per TEU as per box, and every container you ship doubles the error.

Here is the invoice test, done once so you can copy it. Take one 40ft from China to West Africa shipped on June 16. The filing says 500 dollars per TEU, a 40ft is two TEU, so the expected line is 1,000 dollars. If the invoice shows 500, that box is short by 500. Run it across 40 boxes a month and it is 20,000 dollars a month, 60,000 over a quarter, and it keeps running until somebody looks. One check on one invoice is the entire fix.

ONE's range is the second trap. 500 to 600 per 20ft is a range, not a rate, and a range in a filing usually means it varies by origin, destination or commodity. Ask for the number for your lane in writing. Assume nothing, and particularly do not assume the 40ft is double the 20ft just because Maersk's happens to be exactly double.

Build the landed table per 40ft, because that is the unit your finance team forecasts in. Assumption, stated: use MSC's 6,000 per 40ft on Asia-North Europe and 6,500 on Asia-West Med as the reference for base freight, and substitute your own contracted number the moment you have it. Add Maersk's PSS of 1,500 per 40ft from July 7.

Asia-North Europe, sailing to July 6: 6,000 plus zero, so 6,000 dollars. Sailing from July 7: 6,000 plus 1,500, so 7,500 dollars. That is 25% on top of the base, created by one line in one carrier announcement. Asia-West Med, sailing to July 6: 6,500 dollars. From July 7: 6,500 plus 1,500, so 8,000 dollars, or 23.1%. On the transpacific, Far East Asia to the US and Canada, Maersk's 2,000 per 40ft has been live since June 17, so there is no window left on it. There is a 2,000 dollar line on every 40ft you moved in the last week, and the question there is not timing, it is whether your contract passes it through.

Do not add Maersk's PSS to MSC's FAK and call the result a rate. Different carrier, different instrument. The table is a reference stack for budgeting and I have labelled the assumption. Your number is your base freight plus your carrier's surcharge on your effective date.

The transpacific piece deserves its own paragraph, because there is no window left on it and that changes the job completely. Maersk's 1,000 and 2,000 has been live since June 17, so every 40ft you moved in the last week carries a 2,000 dollar line. Two things follow. Check the invoices this week rather than at month end, because surcharge errors are far easier to recover while the filing is fresh. And find out whether your contract passes it through. On spot, it is simply the price. On an annual fixed rate with a surcharge clause, the answer sits in the clause, and the gap between capped and uncapped on 180 FEU a month is the gap between nothing and 270,000 dollars a month.

The June 21 filing is the one everybody will miss: three days out, and it is Africa. CMA CGM's PSS to East and South Africa takes effect on Sunday. If you have boxes gating this week for those trades, the thing to establish is the gate-in date, because a container gated on June 20 against a vessel sailing June 23 may or may not attract the new surcharge depending on the basis. Ask on Friday rather than Monday. Note too that this filing carries no figure in the summary, unlike the West African one at 500 dollars per TEU, so get the number rather than assuming it matches.

The window is where the money is, so price it properly. Assumptions: 180 FEU a month on Asia-North Europe, which is 6 a day. Carrying cost 22% a year on a landed 46,000 dollars a box, which is 27.7 dollars per FEU per day. Both are ours; swap in your own.

Raw window value first. Move one 40ft from a July 8 sailing to a July 6 sailing and you avoid 1,500 dollars. At 6 FEU a day, the eighteen days from June 19 to July 6 carry 108 FEU of ordinary flow. Pulling all of it forward is worth 162,000 dollars gross. You will not pull all of it, because production is not ready and the destination cannot absorb it. Take 65%: 70 FEU, 105,000 dollars gross.

Then net it, because pulling cargo forward is not free. Assume an average pull-forward of 9 days of extra holding: 9 times 27.7 is 249 dollars a box, so the 70 boxes cost you 17,430 dollars of carrying. Net about 87,600 dollars. Still worth doing, and worth doing this week.

Now put that next to the other window, which is bigger and far cheaper to capture. The question almost nobody asks is what the effective date keys off: booking date, gate-in of the full container, vessel departure, or bill of lading date. Carriers differ, and the same carrier sometimes differs by trade. If Maersk's July 7 PSS keys off booking date, then a booking lodged on July 6 against a vessel sailing July 20 escapes it completely, and you have not moved a single box early.

Price that version. On 180 FEU a month, July plus August is 360 FEU. At 1,500 dollars a box that is 540,000 dollars, captured by one email and a booking schedule, against 87,600 dollars net for physically pulling cargo forward and a great deal of operational pain. Get the basis in writing before the end of the week. It is the highest-value hour in this file.

Scale it down for a smaller book, because most readers are not running 180 FEU a month into North Europe. Take 45 FEU a month, which is 1.5 a day. The July 7 step of 1,500 dollars a box is 67,500 dollars a month if you do nothing. The eighteen days from June 19 to July 6 carry 27 FEU of ordinary flow; pulling 65% of that forward is 17 boxes, 25,500 dollars gross, less 9 days of carrying at 27.7 dollars a box, about 4,200 dollars, so roughly 21,300 dollars net. The booking-basis version is 45 FEU across two months, 90 boxes, 135,000 dollars. The proportions do not move. The email is still the highest-value action, and at this size it is a fifth of a year of ocean spend on the lane.

Next, the difference between the instruments, because they behave differently when they move. A FAK, freight all kinds, is the freight rate. When CMA CGM publishes new FAK rates for Asia to North Europe and the Mediterranean effective July 1, that replaces the old freight level from that date. A PSS is a surcharge and it stacks on whatever the freight is. One replaces, the other adds.

Which is why you should never accept a single all-in number. Ask for two lines: base freight with its effective date and validity, and each surcharge separately with its own effective date. When the PSS comes off, or the FAK moves again, only the split lets you re-price without reopening the negotiation. An all-in quote of 7,500 dollars tells you what you pay today and nothing about what changes on July 7.

There is a second reason to insist on the split. Some contracts exclude surcharges, some cap them, and some pass them through with no cap whatsoever. If you are on an annual fixed rate, find that clause before you assume anything. On 180 FEU a month at 1,500 dollars, an uncapped pass-through is 270,000 dollars a month, which annualises to 3.24 million. That clause is worth more than the rate you spent last quarter negotiating.

On the box mix, do the division rather than trusting intuition. Maersk's North Europe and Mediterranean PSS is exactly linear in TEU: 750 on a 20ft, 1,500 on a 40ft. The surcharge per cubic metre is therefore identical whether you ship one 40ft or two 20ft, so consolidating into 40ft saves nothing on this line. Any saving lives in the base freight, and that depends on your own numbers.

Take 3,000 and 5,000 as purely illustrative base rates so the division is visible, and plug in your own. Assume a 20ft loads 27 cubic metres and a 40ft loads 52. Base per cubic metre works out at 111 dollars on the 20ft and 96 on the 40ft, so the 40ft is about 13% cheaper per cube. Add the PSS at 750 and 1,500 respectively and the gap narrows without closing. Run it on your own load factors, and if your 40ft fills to less than double your 20ft, which happens constantly with weight-limited and odd-shaped cargo, the 40ft is the wrong box for the surcharge even when it is the right box for the freight.

One practical consequence: run that exercise across your top five lanes by volume before July 15, and re-rate the boxes where the answer flips. Target 8% of your Asia-Europe boxes re-rated, and put the saving into the Q3 forecast rather than a footnote.

When people see five filings inside three weeks they reach for the word coordinated, and I would hold that loosely. Staggered effective dates are also what you get when four pricing teams run to four different monthly cycles, and the reading of a strongly tightening market ahead of Q3 is a forecast rather than a fact in any of the filings. What you can bank is the calendar: five dates inside twenty-two days, on the trades most importers run peak volume through. Budget against the calendar, not against the adjective.

That calendar has a shape worth planning around regardless. June 15 and June 17 are already in your cost base. June 21, July 1 and July 7 step it higher again. Flat-line your Q3 ocean budget at June levels and you will be roughly 25% short on Asia-North Europe boxes from the second week of July, because that is what 1,500 dollars on a 6,000 dollar base does. Put the step into the forecast now, with the date attached, so that when the overrun lands it is a line you drew rather than a surprise you have to explain.

Sequencing matters more than speed here, because two dates have passed and three are in front of you. This week, reconcile the live ones: pull every invoice for shipments on or after June 15 to West Africa and on or after June 17 transpacific, and check the surcharge line against the filing, unit by unit. Set the recovery target at every mis-billed box credited within 30 days, and name the person who chases it.

Before July 1, get CMA CGM's new FAK in writing, old level and new level side by side, and re-quote every July booking touching Asia-North Europe or the Mediterranean. A quote without an effective date is not a quote, it is a placeholder, and placeholders are exactly how July invoices turn into surprises.

Before July 7, lodge whatever you can against the earlier date, having first confirmed the effective-date basis in writing, because that answer decides whether lodging is even necessary. After July 7, put 7,500 dollars per 40ft on Asia-North Europe and 8,000 on Asia-West Med into the budget as the working number, and flag any month where the Asia-Europe surcharge line exceeds 270,000 dollars on 180 FEU. That is the point at which the surcharge has become a bigger problem than the freight, and it is the point to escalate rather than absorb.

One structural point, because this will happen again. Surcharge filings arrive in clusters and they arrive with dates attached, and the companies that get hurt are the ones treating each filing as an event rather than as an entry on a standing calendar. Build one sheet: carrier, trade, instrument, amount, unit, effective date, basis, and the date you confirmed the basis. Review it weekly through the second quarter. Set an escalation threshold: any single filing above 500 dollars per 40ft on a lane where you run more than 50 FEU a month goes to whoever owns the budget the same day. Every filing in this story clears that bar.

Get the paperwork into one place while you are at it, because the disputes in August are decided by what you can produce. For each affected lane you want four things on file: the carrier announcement with its date, your quotation showing the base and surcharge split, your booking confirmation showing the booking date, and the invoice. Four documents, one folder per lane. When a surcharge is applied on a basis you were never told about, that folder is the entire argument, and assembling it takes twenty minutes now against a week of email archaeology later.

And one thing not to do. Do not respond to five filings by re-tendering the whole book. The dates are staggered, which means the cheapest carrier this week may not be the cheapest in three weeks, and a tender runs longer than the window does. Fix the July and August position with the bookings you can move now, and save the structural conversation for when the cascade has finished landing.

If none of that is available to you, the alternatives are the usual three and each costs something. Ship earlier and hold more, at 27.7 dollars per FEU per day. Shift volume to a carrier whose filing is later or smaller, which is a real option here precisely because the dates are staggered across five days, though a carrier that has not filed yet is not a carrier that never will. Or re-cut the order book, which is the only one of the three that changes the exposure instead of financing it.

Five dates, four carriers, three units, and one summary line about a tightening market. The market can tighten as much as it likes. What I need before the weekend is one sentence from a carrier telling me which date the money keys off, and what you need is a booking schedule that lands on the right side of it. The rest is weather.

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— By Vivian Zhao