West Africa Congestion Adds Up to 20 Days and $800 per 40ft Reefer

The Analysis

I read Hapag-Lloyd's 7 October update the way I read most West Africa port notices now, expecting the number to be worse than last month. Conakry is sitting at 16 to 20 days of berthing delay, Monrovia 8 to 10, Tema 4 to 6, and Freetown above 10. Tema's reefer plug utilisation is quoted above 100 percent. On the boxes caught in that, Hapag-Lloyd charges 250 dollars per TEU from 5 October sailings and CMA CGM is at 400 dollars per TEU for most origins, which lands at roughly 500 and 800 dollars on a 40ft box. Four numbers on one invoice, with a cold chain running straight through the middle of it.

Two of those numbers I take at face value. Two I want to open up before anyone on my desk rebooks a single container. The 250 and the 400 are the pair that bother me, because same ports, same week, two carriers, a 60 percent spread on one physical event. Costs do not fan out like that, prices do. So before we move, I take the figures apart: what is the base, what is the surcharge, who is passing what to whom, and where exactly is the line that says lock it now.

And there is one figure in this update that nobody I have talked to has questioned. A utilisation ratio above 100 percent means the denominator has quietly stopped meaning what it meant last quarter. That is not rounding, that is the yard telling us the binding constraint has moved. I come back to it later, because it decides whether the 800 dollars is the bill or only the deposit.

Let me lay the facts down first, three numbers wide. Berthing delay: Conakry 16 to 20 days, Freetown above 10, Monrovia 8 to 10, Tema 4 to 6. Plug utilisation at Tema: above 100 percent. Money: Hapag-Lloyd at 250 dollars per TEU on sailings from 5 October, CMA CGM at 400 dollars per TEU for most origins, and since a 40ft reefer bills as two TEU, that is roughly 500 and 800 dollars respectively on the box most people actually ship. Everything after this paragraph is about what sits behind those numbers, because the announcement hands you the fee and not the exposure.

Begin with the unit, because the unit is where the money hides. A 40ft reefer is two TEU and one plug. It takes two slots of yard space and one socket of power. The stated cause of the fee is plug scarcity at Tema, quoted above 100 percent. Plug scarcity scales with boxes, one plug per box. The fee scales with TEU, two per 40ft. So a 40ft reefer pays exactly double what a 20ft reefer pays for a constraint that, on the announcement's own description, consumes the same single plug either way. Either the fee base is wrong or the stated cause is wrong. Both readings are unflattering to the carrier, and only one of them is a real cost. Ask your carrier which it is, in writing, before you pay it. The answer usually arrives as silence, which is itself an answer.

Next, the ratio itself. A utilisation above 100 percent is not a figure a yard can produce if the numerator and the denominator are the same kind of thing. If the denominator is installed plugs and the numerator is reefer boxes on the ground, then above 100 means boxes are being kept cold without a socket each: portable gensets, double-banked monitoring, boxes parked on chassis under mobile units. Whichever it is, plugs have stopped being the constraint. What is scarce is yard space, or the genset fleet, or the labour to shift a box from a powered slot to a truck. A surcharge announced on the grounds of plug scarcity and collected into a yard where plugs are no longer the binding limit has quietly moved its own rationale. That is not a reason to refuse payment, it is a reason to push on price, and a reason to ask for that ratio to be published weekly so you can see when the rationale expires.

After that comes the part nobody prints, and it is the part that actually bites. Berthing delay is not storage time. A ship waiting 16 to 20 days at anchor still has your reefer plugged into the ship's own power, and the cold chain is intact. What breaks is the schedule, and the sailing behind the schedule: a vessel that loses 16 days at Conakry does not silently absorb them, it drops a call or rolls the next sailing, and the boxes booked on that sailing take two weeks to come back around through a transshipment hub. The charge that really hurts is storage, the days your box lies inside the terminal after discharge, and that is a completely different number.

Tema's above-100 percent plug ratio is a storage-side symptom; Conakry's 16 to 20 days is a waiting-side symptom. The notice stacks both into one 'congestion' figure, yet the 250 dollars per TEU is collected at origin on the sailing date, before either condition has happened. Read that twice: at origin, on a fixed date, you pay for two failures at the discharge port that may never touch your box, and if they do not happen, the notice carries no refund clause.

So there are two clocks running, and they are not the same clock. The first clock is the surcharge: open from 5 October, per TEU, collected at origin, a fixed number you can quote today. The second clock is the delay: it starts at discharge, counts by the day, and is demurrage plus detention plus plug or monitoring, sized by a free-time clause most shippers have never read closely. Every report covers the first clock. At Conakry the first clock is roughly a fifth of the bill, small. The second clock is the one that empties the wallet, and almost nobody in the trade press mentions it because it is buried in your bill of lading terms, not in the carrier's press release.

Now, why now. Three things stack in the fourth quarter. Reefer volumes in and out of West Africa rise into year end. Berth efficiency cannot improve in two weeks, because a berth is not something you rent, it is concrete and a gangs roster. Plugs are fixed assets: a terminal that has already discovered its reefer area running above 100 percent has no slack left to absorb one bad week, so one bad week rolls into three. The rest is sailing-chain contagion: a ship held 16 days at Conakry is effectively removed from the next round of the schedule, so next round has fewer slots, and slots are the real business logic behind 250 dollars per TEU. This surcharge is not compensation for your delay, it is the price of a slot scarcer than in September. I have watched this pattern repeat on the West Africa trade for years, and the surcharge almost never comes off as fast as it went on.

Who eats this money, and how much, needs several layers, and this is where most shippers lose the thread. On the surcharge alone, a 20ft reefer pays 250 or 400 dollars, a 40ft pays 500 or 800. On the delay clock, the 40ft loses worse, because reefer equipment carries a higher daily rate than dry, and because a 40ft is harder to find a powered slot for once the yard is full. Cut by cargo type and the picture shifts again: frozen retail goods heading into year end, if they carry buffer stock, can absorb a 16 day slide, and the surcharge is noise, the delay only a planning problem; chilled fruit and vegetables with a nine day shelf life after arrival are not a planning problem, they are a write-off the moment the berth slips.

Cut by trade term and you find some exporters never pay the 800 at all. Under CIF or CFR terms the seller carries ocean freight and the surcharge sits with them; under FOB the buyer arranges and pays the ocean leg, so the 800 lands on the buyer, who finds out later and deducts it from the next invoice. Not paying today is not the same as not paying, it is only paying later and less visibly.

The carrier price gap deserves its own line, because it is free money on the table and most people leave it there. The same 40ft reefer, same lane, same week, 500 against 800, a 300 dollar gap per box. Ten boxes a month is 3,000 dollars, more than many mid-size shippers spend on a transport management system in a year. Two carriers quoting 60 percent apart on the same physical port is not two cost structures, it is two pricing decisions made in different buildings. Shop the price, and shop it on the actual sailing date you want, because the surcharge is filed per carrier, per origin, per sailing, not as one uniform number you can memorise. I have seen the same box quoted 500 on one sailing and 800 on the next simply because the filing window moved, so the date matters as much as the carrier.

Free time also earns its own paragraph, because it is the variable that turns a 500 dollar problem into a 4,000 dollar one, and the only variable you can still buy down through negotiation. Demurrage is what the terminal charges for a box inside the gate, detention is what the carrier charges for a box outside the gate and still on its equipment. Reefers add a plug or monitoring fee on top, and plenty of West African terminals charge that line without mercy, sometimes by the day, sometimes by the plug event.

Free time is the free-day allowance before any of it starts, and most West Africa reefer bookings quietly carry only 7 days of combined free time, while Conakry's delay is 16 to 20 days, which alone eats your entire free allowance and then keeps charging. Pushing free time from 7 to 14 days buys a week of buffer when delay hits, and that single move is usually worth more than the 300 dollar price gap, because it caps the second clock rather than the first.

Let me run the numbers on one box, with the assumptions written down so nobody can say I invented them. Take a single 40ft reefer carrying, say, 40,000 dollars of frozen product, cargo value X. Assume the combined demurrage and detention free period is the 7 days most West Africa reefer bookings quietly carry. Say your detention after free time is Y dollars a day on a 40ft, and terminal demurrage is another Y a day, so the exposed rate once free time is gone is 2Y a day. At Conakry, berthing delay runs 16 to 20 days; at a clean port it would be 6.

The extra 10 to 14 days of delay is not stacked demurrage by itself, because the box stays powered on the ship while it waits at anchor, so the cold chain holds and the damage is schedule, not storage, until the ship actually discharges. But once it discharges into a yard already above 100 percent on plugs, your box competes for a socket and a slot, and that is where the 7 day free time gets eaten. If berthing slips to 16 days and free time is 7, you are exposed for 9 days at 2Y a day, so 18Y on one box, plus the 800 dollar surcharge from the start.

Against a clean 6 day berth and the same 7 day free time, you pay zero detention and still eat the 800. The crossover is the point where delay plus plug competition pushes your exposure past the cost of changing port or air-freighting the time-critical part. Crudely: if 18Y plus 800 exceeds the incremental cost of rerouting or air for the urgent portion, you change plans. With Y at 120 dollars, 18Y is 2,160, plus 800 is 2,960; once that crosses your reroute or air option, the delay has stopped being noise and become a decision.

The threshold I use is plain: if quoted Conakry berthing stays above 14 days and your cargo carries a fixed sell-by or production date inside 30 days, hold the shipment or move it, do not gamble on the berth. The 20 day end of the range is the one that should trigger a port change, not a shrug.

And a word on the reroute temptation, because it is the obvious move and it has its own trap. Abidjan, Lome and Dakar are the usual escape valves, and each carries its own delay and its own plug story. You do not solve a 16 day Conakry wait by shifting to a port that is itself running 10, so the reroute only pays when the destination market can absorb the overland leg or the new port is genuinely clear. I have moved cargo off West Africa congested ports and watched it trade one delay for another, so the reroute decision has to be made on that port's current berth picture, not on the hope that anywhere else is better. The air alternative is narrower: you only ever air-freight the time-critical slice, never the whole reefer, because air on a full 40ft of frozen food is a loss you do not recover. The calculation above tells you exactly when that slice is worth pulling out.

The insurance pitfall is the last thing I will name, and it is the one that surfaces three months later. A reefer claim for spoilage during a 20 day wait is almost never a clean carrier liability, because the carrier's defence is that the equipment held temperature and the delay was a port condition outside its control. Your policy then decides who pays, and most cargo policies exclude or cap delay-driven loss unless you bought the extension and documented the temperature log at every handover. If you move reefers into this trade without a temperature log requirement written into the haulage contract, you will lose the claim on paperwork, not on the facts. That is the quiet cost nobody prices on the day they book.

The practical check I run before paying any of this is boring but it has saved clients real money. Pull the carrier's published surcharge filing for your exact origin and sailing week, not the headline rate, because the 250 and the 400 are filed per lane and the number on your booking may differ from the press figure. Then open the bill of lading terms and find the free-time line, the one that says how many combined days you get before demurrage and detention start. If that line reads 7 and your cargo is headed to Conakry or Freetown, the math above already tells you the exposure, so the negotiation over free time is the first call I make, not the last. None of this requires a new system, it requires reading two documents most shippers file away without ever opening.

So what to do now, and where the dates are. Fourth-quarter volumes rise and berths will not improve in two weeks, which means this surcharge and this delay are not one-off, they hang on through year end and probably into the first quarter. My advice is not complicated, but it has to land on a named person and a fixed date: pull the free-time clause out of its default and negotiate it, then shop the price across both carriers, then re-quote the delivery dates with a real buffer, then write the surcharge into the sales contract to fix who carries it. The items below are the actions you can tick straight off, and I would have all of them moving before 17 October, because the sailings that matter depart in the back half of the month.

↑ Back to the key points

— By Leo