November FAK: CMA CGM and MSC Add Up to $500 a Box on Asia-Med, Maersk $1,000 PSS

The Analysis

Three carrier notices landed inside the same 48 hours and none of them uses the same unit. CMA CGM lifts FAK from Asian base ports to the West Mediterranean, Adriatic, East Mediterranean and Black Sea by $300 a box between 1 and 14 November, with North Africa going up $100 per 20ft and $200 per 40ft. MSC adds $500 per 40ft on the West Mediterranean and Adriatic, $300 on the East Mediterranean and Black Sea, and leaves North Europe exactly where it was. Maersk puts a peak season surcharge on Oceania from the 1 November calculation date: $500 per 20ft and $1,000 per 40ft to Australia, $300 and $600 to New Zealand, on non-SPOT bookings only.

Read those three lines again and what jumps out is not the size of the numbers. It is that no two of them are measured the same way. One is per box. One is per 40ft. One is a surcharge sitting on top of freight you already pay, and it excludes an entire product. The headline about $500 a box is doing a great deal of work for a sentence that would not survive an audit.

Give me the number, not the feeling. So we start with the units, because this week the money is in the units. And there is one line in the Maersk notice that turns the whole story upside down: non-SPOT only. We come back to it.

Start with the arithmetic of the announcement itself. CMA CGM's $300 is quoted a box. MSC's $500 is quoted per 40ft. Maersk's $1,000 is also quoted per 40ft, but it sits on top of freight you already pay, because a peak season surcharge is additive by definition while a FAK is the freight. These are not three versions of the same event. They are three different instruments, and one of them is not a freight move at all.

Now the part worth a calculator. Inside a single CMA CGM notice there are two pricing logics sitting side by side. North Africa is priced by equipment size: $100 on a 20ft, $200 on a 40ft, so the 40ft pays exactly twice the 20ft. The main Mediterranean trades are priced per box: $300, whether you load a 20ft or a 40ft. Write your own loading assumption in and the split appears. Suppose a 20ft carries 28 cbm of paying cargo and a 40ft carries 60 cbm, a conservative pair of numbers for most general cargo. On the main Med trades the 20ft shipper pays $300 divided by 28, which is $10.71 per cubic metre. The 40ft shipper pays $300 divided by 60, which is $5.00 per cubic metre. Same carrier, same notice, same trade, 2.14 times the increase per unit of space.

Run the same arithmetic on North Africa and you get $100 over 28, which is $3.57, against $200 over 60, which is $3.33. A ratio of 1.07. Whoever wrote the notice priced North Africa in proportion to the box and priced the Mediterranean in proportion to nothing in particular. If you ship 20ft boxes to Genoa you are being asked to carry roughly twice the increase per cubic metre as the 40ft shipper on the same service, and three times the North Africa rate, on a lane that is not three times as far. That is not a market signal. That is a drafting choice, and drafting choices are negotiable in a way that market signals are not.

There is one more caliber question inside the CMA CGM line, and it is the kind that never reaches a headline. The increase applies from Asian base ports. Base port is a defined list, and it is shorter than the list of ports you can actually load from. If you load at a feeder port and tranship through a hub, the question is whether the $300 follows the cargo or stops at the base port gate, and whether the feeder add-on sitting on top of it moves as well. Two shippers loading in the same week for the same discharge port can end up with different increases purely because of where the box was gated in. Nobody announces the feeder treatment. Ask, and get it in writing, because the answer changes your effective rate and it changes which origin you book from in November.

Put CMA CGM and MSC side by side on the West Mediterranean and something else surfaces. One asks $300 a box, the other asks $500 per 40ft. On a 40ft that is a $200 gap between two carriers selling the same week, the same origin range and the same discharge range. If this were a coordinated move you would see the same number with the same wording. You do not. Two price points in two different units is what a market looks like when each pricing desk is testing how far it can go on its own book. For a shipper that is good news, and it has a shelf life: the gap is worth money for as long as both are testing, and it closes the moment one of them decides the other was right.

MSC's notice has a different shape, and the most informative number in it is the one that did not move. North Europe is unchanged. Zero. If this were a cost push, meaning bunkers, canal tolls, war risk premium, the things that cost the same whichever way the bow is pointing, North Europe would move as well, because a ship burning fuel to Felixstowe burns the same fuel to Valencia. A zero on North Europe next to a $500 on the West Mediterranean says this is a capacity and revenue decision taken lane by lane. That distinction is the entire negotiating position. Costs are not negotiable. Revenue management is.

Why November, and why a fourteen day window. The date range is the tell. A carrier confident of holding a rate announces it for a month, or attaches it to a GRI cycle with a stated expiry. A window running 1 to 14 November is a probe. Put the number on the board, watch what the booking desk sees over the first ten days, and decide on the 12th or the 13th whether to extend it, trim it, or let it lapse. It also lands exactly where the calendar wants it. European year end restock arrives in late November and early December, contract administrators start building the January reset base in the second half of November, and every weekly print between now and then feeds somebody's formula. A number announced on 1 November and quietly held through the 20th is a number that shows up in a January contract base. A number announced on 1 November and walked back on the 15th does not.

The capacity backdrop makes the probe look more confident than it is. In the same week, Sea-Intelligence counted deployed capacity on the transpacific and Asia-Europe trades at a record for the Golden Week window, with Asia-Mediterranean running 18% above the third quarter. Announcing a rate increase into a lane that is 18% fuller than it was three months ago is a bold way to read your own market. It works if the boxes are really there. It does not work if the extra capacity arrived because typhoon congestion bunched vessels rather than because demand picked up, in which case those ships are full of October cargo that should have sailed in October, and November's cargo is a separate question entirely.

Who actually pays, and how much. Four groups, and the answer differs for each. A shipper on a fixed annual contract with no FAK or GRI pass-through clause pays nothing on 1 November. That is the largest share in most books and the one the headlines never mention. A shipper on a contract with an adjustment clause pays whatever the clause says, which is sometimes the full amount and sometimes a fraction, and is always worth reading before you argue about it. A spot or tariff shipper pays the announced number minus whatever the booking desk concedes, and the concession is a function of your volume and of how full the sailing is. And a shipper moving Oceania cargo on Maersk SPOT pays no PSS at all, which sounds like a win until you look at what SPOT pricing already did.

Here is the part that appears in none of the three announcements and in none of the coverage of them. FAK is a freight-all-kinds tariff rate. It is the rate that applies to cargo with no contract rate attached to it. It is not a universal increase and it was never written to be read as one. The $300 and the $500 are the price of not having a contract, and the size of the number tells you less about the market than it tells you about what the carrier thinks your alternative is. So the useful question on 30 October is not how big the increase is. It is what share of your November boxes sit on contract, on tariff and on spot. A shipper running 80% contract with a clean clause pays zero against a $500 headline. A shipper running 80% spot pays close to $400 on an average box. Same headline, entirely different November.

And then the Maersk inversion, which is the sharpest line in the whole week's news. The Oceania peak season surcharge applies to non-SPOT bookings only. Read that slowly. The surcharge is loaded onto contract and tariff cargo, and it is not loaded onto spot. The instinct is to move Oceania bookings onto SPOT and dodge $1,000 a 40ft. Do not bother. Maersk excludes SPOT because SPOT is priced dynamically and the peak is already inside the quote. The charge has not gone away, it has been renamed. What you can actually influence is the calculation date, not the product.

Which brings us to the most under-asked question of surcharge season: what date counts. Maersk says the PSS starts from the 1 November calculation date. Calculation date is a defined term for each carrier and it is not always the date you would guess. It can be the booking creation date, the date the shipping order is issued, the estimated time of departure, or the gate-in cut-off, and the gap between the first and the last of those is five to ten days of cargo. If your carrier's calculation date is the booking date, a booking created on 31 October for a 5 November sailing is priced in October. If it is the ETD, it is not. No announcement publishes this. Your account manager will answer it in one email. Ask before 31 October and that answer is worth up to $1,000 a box.

When does it reach your P&L. A booking taken on 1 November with an Asia to West Mediterranean transit of roughly 28 to 32 days lands in early December, so the cost turns up in December arrivals and in either Q4 or Q1 cost of goods depending on how you account freight. Oceania is shorter, around 20 to 25 days to the Australian east coast, so November bookings land in late November. The 14 November expiry makes 15 November the second decision point. If the increase is renewed at the full amount for the second half of November, treat it as real and go renegotiate your contract share. If it lapses, the carriers that held it will discount quietly to fill December sailings, and whoever panicked on 1 November will have paid for nothing.

Let us put numbers on it. Take a Shenzhen furniture exporter moving 40 boxes a month to the West Mediterranean, 30 of them 40ft high cube and 10 of them 20ft, all on tariff rather than contract. That is the worst case and it is a common one for mid-sized exporters. On MSC the 40ft boxes pick up $500 each, which is $15,000. The notice does not give a 20ft figure, so assume for the moment it is half the 40ft at $250 each, which is $2,500. November's incremental bill is $17,500. Because the window is fourteen days rather than a month, the cargo actually falling inside it is roughly half the month: call it 15 40ft and 5 20ft, which is $8,750. The same exporter on CMA CGM's per-box $300 pays $12,000 for the month and about $6,000 inside the window. The choice of carrier is worth $2,750 on the fortnight alone, before anyone has negotiated anything.

Now the margin version, which is the one that matters. Assume each 40ft carries $60,000 of goods and the business runs an 8% gross margin, so the margin sitting in a 40ft is $4,800. A $500 increase is 0.83% of cargo value and 10.4% of the gross margin on that box. Absorb it and you have shipped a tenth of your profit to the carrier. Pass it on and you need a buyer to accept a price rise inside a fortnight, which is why the notification email goes out on 28 October rather than on 1 November.

One more, for the Oceania PSS. Assume 10 40ft a month to Sydney, four of them on SPOT and six on contract with a PSS pass-through. The bill is six times $1,000, which is $6,000, not $10,000. Move two of the six onto SPOT and you save $2,000 on the surcharge line while probably losing more than that on the base. How you split contract and spot is a bigger lever than the surcharge itself.

What would make me wrong. Three things. A fourth carrier matching at similar levels within seven days turns a probe into a general increase and the negotiating room disappears with it, so watch the other notices between now and 7 November. Blank sailings announced on the Mediterranean for the second half of November would convert a price announcement into a genuine capacity squeeze, and then the $500 holds and you book early. And a renewal on 15 November at the full amount is the clearest signal that the acceptance rate was high enough. The opposite case is just as easy to recognise: no match by the 7th, no blanks, and a quiet reversion on the 15th, which is what happened often enough across these same lanes in 2024 and 2025. Watch the base rate rather than the surcharge. Surcharges are announced loudly and withdrawn quietly; base rates move in small steps and stay moved.

Where is the line, and what happens when you cross it. For a West Mediterranean shipper, the tripwire I would write into a policy is this: if the all-in spot rate on your lane sits more than 15% above your contract rate for two consecutive weeks, raise the contract share at the next reset instead of riding spot and hoping. If it sits more than 10% below your contract rate for a full month, do the opposite and push contract volume down towards the floor your carrier will accept. Fifteen and ten, two weeks and a month. Write the numbers down today, because the decision you make in the last week of November with a surcharge notice in front of you will be worse than the one you make now.

Alternatives, and the trap inside each one. Switching discharge port: North Europe is unchanged on MSC, so routing to Rotterdam or Antwerp and trucking or railing south looks like a free $500. It is not free. Add the inland leg, the extra handling, the extra three to seven days of transit, and the fact that your delivery terms and your customer's collection arrangements were built around Genoa or Barcelona. The rule is simple. Quote the inland leg yourself and take the switch only if the inland cost is less than the $500 you are avoiding with something left over. From Rotterdam to northern Italy it is usually close, and close is not good enough to rebuild a routing for a fortnight.

Switching terms: if you are the exporter on FOB, this is your buyer's problem and your job is to tell them on 28 October rather than let them find it on the invoice. If you are on CIF or CFR it is yours, and the question to ask is whether your November quotations already assumed a stable rate. If the buyer is the party holding the carrier contract, establish who controls the booking before you assume who carries the cost. Switching product is the SPOT trap covered above. Switching timing, meaning pulling November cargo onto late October sailings, works if the calculation date is the booking date and fails if it is the ETD, and it also fails if the October sailings are already full, which in a week when deployed capacity is running above normal is a live risk rather than a theoretical one.

Switching carrier is worth a real quotation, because $300 a box and $500 per 40ft is a $2,750 gap on the fortnight in the example above. Just remember that CMA CGM's per-box and MSC's per-40ft are not the same measure. Compare all-in, and compare per cubic metre, not per announcement. Carriers publish what they would like to be paid. Bookers pay what the market allows. A fourteen day window is the honest part of the notice: it is the carrier telling you they are not sure either. Answer with a number of your own, your contract share, your box mix, your calculation date, and the whole thing stops being a headline and becomes a line on a spreadsheet, which is where it belonged all along.

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— By Vivian Zhao