CMA CGM Announces Staggered Peak Season Surcharges Across Asia-Canada, West Africa, and Mediterranean Trades

The Analysis

CMA CGM has published a staggered peak season surcharge schedule, and the dates are the real story. Taiwan to Canada runs three windows: June 15-30 at $2,065/$2,530/$3,060 per 20/40/45-foot box, July 1-9 at $1,800/$2,000/$2,530, then July 10 onwards at $3,600/$4,000/$5,050, more than double the window before it. From July 1, a $1,400 per TEU PSS covers everything from the Far East, China, Northeast Asia, and Southeast Asia, to the Mediterranean and North Africa, and a $200 per TEU PSS starts on Northeast Asia to West Africa. China to West Africa South pays $575 per TEU from June 22 and Mauritania $600, then both reset to $200 on July 1, the same level that applies to Southeast Asia to West Africa.

We'll run the numbers, because a 100% published increase between two adjacent nine-day windows is not a market signal you need to interpret. It is an appointment. The 40-foot Canada box is $2,000 on July 5 and $4,000 on July 15 if you load it there, and the Med box carries what amounts to a second freight rate from July 1. What follows is the arithmetic on a real program, the five dates that matter, and the split between what you lock this week and what you let the calendar decide.

Read the CMA CGM announcement the way you would read a price list with a trap built into it, because that is what it is. Taiwan to Canada, three windows: June 15-30 at $2,065 per 20-foot, $2,530 per 40-foot, and $3,060 per 45-foot. July 1-9 at $1,800, $2,000, and $2,530. Then July 10 onwards at $3,600, $4,000, and $5,050, more than double the previous window. Meanwhile a $1,400 per TEU peak season surcharge lands July 1 on everything from the Far East, including China, Northeast Asia, and Southeast Asia, to the Mediterranean and North Africa. Northeast Asia to West Africa gets a $200 per TEU PSS from July 1. China to West Africa South, which means Angola, Congo, DRC, Namibia, Gabon, and Cameroon, takes $575 per TEU from June 22, and Mauritania takes $600 per TEU. Then from July 1, both of those switch to $200 per TEU, and the same $200 covers Southeast Asia to West Africa.

We'll run the numbers, because the Taiwan-to-Canada ladder is the part that makes this announcement worth more than a routine filing. Look at the middle window. For a 40-foot box, July 1-9 is $2,000. July 10 is $4,000. The carrier is publishing, in advance and in writing, a 100% increase in nine days. That is not a market move you have to guess at. That is an appointment. The June 15-30 window at $2,530 actually costs more than the early July window at $2,000, which tells you the carrier expects the genuine demand surge to hit from mid-July, and is willing to discount the gap week to keep vessels full through it. The people who designed this ladder know exactly where their utilization curve bends. The discount is the confession. We can argue about whether the demand shows up. The carrier has already told us what it believes, with money.

Let's do the math on a real program. Assume you ship 50 TEU a month of Taiwan-origin cargo to Canada, a mid-size program. Under the first window, your monthly PSS bill at 40-foot equivalents, say 35 of the 50 are 40-footers and the rest 20s, runs roughly 35 times $2,530 plus 15 times $2,065, which is $88,550 plus $30,975, so about $119,500. Slide the same volume one week later into the July 1-9 window: 35 times $2,000 plus 15 times $1,800, which is $70,000 plus $27,000, so $97,000.

You just saved $22,500 by moving seven days. Now miss the window and load July 10 or after: 35 times $4,000 plus 15 times $3,600, which is $140,000 plus $54,000, so $194,000. The difference between the good window and the bad window, for one mid-size program, is $97,000 a month. Every week of indecision in this announcement has a nine-figure monthly price tag on a 50-TEU book. That is why the booking calendar, not the rate negotiation, is the profit lever this quarter.

The Mediterranean number deserves its own paragraph, because $1,400 per TEU from July 1 is not a surcharge, it is a second freight rate. If your base rate on Far East to Med is running anywhere near $2,000 to $2,500 per TEU, this PSS adds 55% to 70% on top, effective on the same day across China, Northeast Asia, and Southeast Asia origins. Assume you move 30 TEU a month into the Med: that is $42,000 a month of pure surcharge from July 1, before the base rate moves at all. And note the exclusion written into the announcement, Timor-Leste, plus the scope line: all cargo, dry and reefer on the West Africa lanes. The scope is wide enough that nobody in those trades gets to pretend it does not apply to them.

Here is what the ladder actually says about the quarter, because a published schedule is a carrier telling you its demand forecast in the only language it trusts, which is pricing. The dip between window one and window two, $2,530 down to $2,000 on a 40-footer, is not generosity. It is utilization management: the carrier knows the tariff-deadline frontload crowds are sailing in late June and again from mid-July, and the first week of July is the trough between them. Then the July 10 window at $4,000 more than doubles, which is the carrier saying it expects the mid-July sailings to fill. If it expected empty decks on July 15, publishing a doubling would be commercial suicide, because nobody would book and the boxes would wait a week and sail anyway.

Carriers do not publish suicide. So the working assumption for your planning is: the July 10 window is real, it will hold at least through the window's opening weeks, and the gap week is the last cheap water on this lane until the demand curve tells us otherwise. Plan to the published ladder, not to your hope that it collapses. The cost of planning to the ladder and seeing it soften is zero; you just book lower. The cost of planning to the collapse and being wrong is $2,000 a box.

Now put the whole announcement on one calendar, because the dates are the actual product. June 22: the $575 China-to-West Africa South charge and the $600 Mauritania charge switch on. June 28: your practical last call for Mediterranean cargo to gate in before the July 1 line. July 1: four things happen on the same day, the Taiwan-Canada window two opens at $1,800/$2,000/$2,530, the $1,400 per TEU Med and North Africa PSS starts, the Northeast Asia to West Africa $200 starts, and the China West Africa charges reset to $200.

July 9: the cheap Canada window closes. July 10: the Canada ladder jumps to $3,600/$4,000/$5,050. Four of those dates fall inside the next two and a half weeks. A program with lanes into Canada, the Med, and West Africa is not looking at one decision here; it is looking at five, and two of them expire before your next weekly meeting. The importers who do well in announcements like this are the ones who treat the effective-date column as the headline, and the dollar column as the footnote.

The Med-North Africa $1,400 also quietly reorders your origin mix. If you source the same SKU from both Southeast Asia and China for Mediterranean delivery, the announcement prices both origins identically from July 1, which removes any surcharge reason to prefer one. But the base rate side rarely moves in lockstep, and the Southeast Asia legs have been the softer of the two all season in most weeks. So the July 1 PSS hits your China-origin boxes and your Southeast Asia boxes at the same rate, but your total cost per box was never the same to begin with, and the percentage impact is bigger on the cheaper base.

Run the combined number, base plus $1,400, by origin, before July 1, and shift what can be shifted. On a 30-TEU Med program, a 5% shift of volume toward the cheaper combined origin is worth roughly $2,000 to $3,000 a month depending on the base rate spread. Small numbers, but they recur every month the PSS stays on, and surcharges like this have a record of outliving the peaks that justified them.

One more mechanic worth flagging: the announcement says the $1,400 covers the Far East including China, Northeast Asia, and Southeast Asia, excluding Timor-Leste, and the West Africa $200 lines cover dry and reefer. If you move anything temperature-controlled into West Africa, the $200 is per TEU, and reefer boxes are usually rated per 40-foot unit in your contract, so check whether your reefer 40 gets billed one TEU or two. The wording of a PSS announcement never reaches your invoice by itself; it passes through a rating engine, and rating engines make their own assumptions. The audit point is not paranoia, it is arithmetic: a two-TEU rating on a reefer 40 doubles the surcharge, and nobody refunds it unless you ask in the same month it bills.

So the full week-one checklist, with names against it. Logistics lead: gate-in schedule for every Canada-bound Taiwan or Asia box, targeting the July 1-9 window, with the June 30 window as the priced fallback and no cargo defaulting into July 10. Procurement: the Med origin mix comparison, base plus $1,400 by origin, decision by June 26. Inventory owner: the West Africa call, load in June at $575 or wait for July 1 at $200, decided on safety stock cover, not on general anxiety. Forwarder: written confirmation on the roll policy, gate-in versus sailing as the governing timestamp, and two alternative-carrier quotes on Taiwan to Canada. Finance: the surcharge lines added to the July budget as dated, known costs, not absorbed as variance. None of that requires a forecast. All of it requires this week.

Now the West Africa structure, because it is the most interesting price signal in the whole announcement. China to West Africa South is $575 per TEU from June 22, and Mauritania $600. Then on July 1, both collapse to $200 per TEU, and Southeast Asia to West Africa gets the same $200. Read that reversal. The carrier front-loads a $575 charge for a ten-day window, then cuts it 65% for the rest of the peak. That is a toll gate on early cargo, not a demand signal. If your West Africa cargo can load after July 1, loading it before July 1 costs you $375 per TEU extra for the privilege of ten days. On 20 TEU, that is $7,500 to save ten days. Maybe that is worth it if you are restocking a line that is already empty. If your safety stock covers you, it is not. The announcement, read as a whole, is really a set of dates wearing a price list's clothes.

So here is the calendar that falls out of this announcement, with owners attached. This week, by June 25, your logistics lead gets every Taiwan-origin or Asia-origin Canada-bound purchase order stamped with a load-by date inside the July 1-9 window. That window is nine days long and vessels in it will fill, because everyone who can read this announcement will aim for the same nine days. If your forwarder cannot confirm space in that window, the fallback is not July 10 at $4,000; the fallback is the June window at $2,530 for the 40-footer, which is $1,470 cheaper per box than the spike. In other words, the worst outcome is not the expensive window. The worst outcome is the default, drifting into July 10 unbooked and paying the top of the ladder for the privilege of not deciding.

Second calendar item, for the Mediterranean traders: anything that can be loaded before July 1 has until roughly June 28 to make a vessel, given standard transits and cutoffs, and dodging the $1,400 is worth a real premium only if the alternative is not delay. Do not burn $300 per TEU on a premium product to dodge $1,400; do accept a slower routing at a small premium. The arithmetic is simple: the PSS is per box, so is the premium, and only the per-box comparison matters. Run it SKU by SKU with your forwarder before you commit.

The West Africa book comes third: if your stock position survives until July 1, do not pay $575. The $200 lane from July 1 is the same water, the same carrier. The only reason to load in June is a shelf that goes empty without it. Put the decision in the hands of whoever owns the safety stock numbers, this week, because after June 22 the $575 clock is running and the announcement gives no indication it extends.

What to do about the carrier itself, this week. Call and ask one question: will you honor a booking dated inside the July 1-9 window even if the vessel rolls past July 10? This is the single most important sentence you can say to a sales rep this month. A rolled booking that lands in the $3,600/$4,000/$5,050 window is the trap inside the trap, and some carriers will re-rate you at the level in force when the box actually loads. Get the answer in writing on the booking confirmation, not in an email thread. If they will not commit, price that risk in: assume a one-in-three chance of rolling, and the expected cost of a roll on a 40-footer is roughly a third of the $2,000 window-to-window jump, call it $670 per box of expected value. That number should be part of your lane comparison, not a surprise.

The alternatives, each priced. A different carrier on Taiwan to Canada: their PSS schedules will differ in dates and levels, and the spread between carriers in a week like this can exceed $500 per FEU, so re-quote two alternatives before accepting the ladder as given; the announcement sets CMA CGM's prices, not the market's. A transshipment via a hub with a different surcharge origin: sometimes cargo booked to a Canadian destination via a different first carrier takes a different surcharge basis entirely; your forwarder can quote the same box two ways in an hour. Deferring the Canada program into August: the PSS ladder says nothing about August, which means it is unbudgeted, which means you are guessing; if NRF-style demand curves apply to your category, deferring is cheap, and if your category frontloads, deferring is how you pay the top of the next ladder too.

The pitfalls. The surcharge basis: this announcement mixes per-TEU and per-box-size pricing, and the West Africa PSS switches basis from lane-specific windows to a flat $200; make sure your invoice audit this month checks every PSS line against the announcement's own dates, because billing systems lag announcements by weeks and you will be overcharged in the gap. Reefer cargo: the $200 West Africa PSS explicitly covers dry and reefer, but the Med line says all cargo without that qualifier, so confirm in writing whether your reefer boxes to the Med cop the full $1,400; on a reefer 40-footer that is a material sum. Validity dates: the June 15-30 window ends on a Tuesday and the next one starts the next day; boxes that gate-in June 30 and sail July 1 sit in exactly the ambiguity that billing disputes are made of, so get the gate-in date, not the sailing date, written into the rate agreement as the governing timestamp.

The budget question comes next, because announcements like this one do not just move costs, they move them onto specific calendar weeks, and that is actually good news for anyone who has to defend a number. Assume your finance team set the third quarter ocean budget using spring rates with a flat 10% surcharge allowance. Walk through what this announcement does to that number on a mixed program of 30 TEU to Canada, 30 TEU to the Med, and 20 TEU to West Africa.

Canada, in the July 10 window at 40-foot equivalents, say 20 forties and 10 twenties: 20 times $4,000 plus 10 times $3,600 is $116,000 of PSS exposure in a single month if you load there, versus $48,500 in the July 1-9 window. Med: 30 TEU times $1,400 is $42,000 from July 1. West Africa, from July 1: 20 TEU times $200 is $4,000, which is almost a rounding error next to the other two, and that is precisely why the $200 reset matters, it turns a surcharge problem into a scheduling problem.

The whole point is that none of these numbers are estimates anymore. They are published, dated, and in writing. A budget built from this announcement is a budget with names, dates, and amounts, and the only open variable is which window your cargo actually gates in. That is a defensible number in any finance review, and it beats a variance memo written after the fact by a mile.

The relationship conversation is worth having this week too, and it is a short one. If you are a regular on any of these lanes, ask your CMA CGM account manager two things: what the surcharge picture looks like after the published windows end, and whether any of your volume can be protected at window-two levels for the balance of July. You will not always get a straight answer, but the question itself changes how your bookings get treated when space gets tight at the end of the cheap window. Carriers reward the accounts that read their announcements and respond inside the validity period. The account that calls on June 24 with a specific request tied to the published dates is the account that gets the last forty feet of space on the July 3 sailing. The account that calls on July 11 asking why their rate doubled is just weather.

And keep the whole thing in proportion. This is a surcharge schedule, not a market collapse and not a rate war. The base rates underneath are doing whatever base rates do, and the PSS ladder is a pricing overlay that rewards one thing above all: being ready on a date. Cargo that is produced, customs-cleared at origin, and ready to gate in during the July 1-9 window captures the entire value of every negotiation trick in this business combined. Cargo that is still on a factory floor on July 10 pays for it. The announcement has done the analysis for you; it has named the day, named the price, and left you nine days of grace in between. Nine days is either a lot of time or none, depending entirely on what your purchase orders say.

The number to carry out of all this is 100%. That is the published increase between two adjacent windows on one lane, in nine days, in writing, from the carrier itself. Carriers ask you to commit to forecasts, volume commitments, and booking etiquette. This announcement is them publishing their own forecast, with prices attached. The difference between the importers who eat the top of this ladder and the ones who don't will not be negotiating skill. It will be whether their cargo was ready to gate in during the second week of July, or merely planned to be.

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— By Vivian Zhao