Hapag-Lloyd and Maersk Add $1,500/TEU Hormuz Surcharge; 280 Cargo Ships in Transit Globally

The Analysis

Two rate notices landed on June 24 and both carry the same number. Hapag-Lloyd added a $1,500/TEU Hormuz Strait surcharge to every booking touching the Arabian Peninsula and Gulf trades. Maersk matched it the same day, also $1,500/TEU. That completes a ladder that now reads: Yang Ming $750, ONE $900, CMA CGM $950, MSC $1,200, and Hapag-Lloyd plus Maersk at $1,500. One strait, six price tags. And the new charge stacks on top of the standard Asia-Europe PSS of $500-$1,200/TEU that is already set for July sailings.

The traffic data behind the pricing, per straits.live: 717 vessels in transit globally, of which 280 are cargo ships and 251 are tankers. 41 carrier vessels are still stranded inside the Strait, holding about 204,000 TEU. All nine major liner operators are running Asia-Europe via the Cape of Good Hope.

Those are the facts on the notices. What follows is what they cost you per TEU, per month, and what I would get done about it before the end of this week.

Look at the spread first, because the spread is the story. Six carriers, six numbers, from $750 to $1,500. A hundred percent of headroom between the floor and the ceiling on the same patch of water, the same week. This number is a bit off, and that is not a complaint, it is information. When surcharges cluster tightly, the market has converged on a shared risk view and there is little to negotiate. When they fan out this wide, each carrier is pricing its own exposure and its own appetite, which means the gap is negotiable. Somebody at $750 is buying volume. Somebody at $1,500 is selling caution. Your job this week is to find out which is which.

We run the numbers. Assume a mid-size importer on the Gulf lane, 20 forty-foot containers per month, which is 40 TEU, shipping out of East China to Jebel Ali. Under the Hapag-Lloyd and Maersk notice, the Hormuz surcharge alone is 1,500 times 40, or $60,000 a month. Annualized, that is $720,000 for one line on the invoice. The July PSS of $500-$1,200/TEU comes on top. Take the $850 midpoint and you add another $34,000 a month. Combined, call it $94,000 a month in surcharges on one modest Gulf program, roughly $1.13 million a year. That is the ask for moving boxes through water your cargo does not actually choose.

Now price the same program across the ladder. At Yang Ming's $750, the surcharge bill is $30,000 a month, exactly half of the Hapag-Maersk load. At MSC's $1,200 it is $48,000. The same 40 TEU, the same strait, and a monthly spread of $30,000 between the cheapest and the most expensive notice. Over a quarter that spread is $90,000, which is more than most mid-size shippers spend on their entire destination charges for a quarter. Before you jump at the cheapest line, hold on: surcharge level buys nothing by itself about space guarantees, schedule reliability, or where you sit in the queue when vessels get held. The notices do not publish that part. You get it by asking, in writing, before the booking is confirmed.

The second layer of the pricing is the stacking itself. The Hormuz surcharge sits on top of a standard Asia-Europe PSS of $500-$1,200/TEU for July sailings. Two layers on one booking, and the invoice will happily print them as one blended number if you let it. Every peak season somebody discovers in September that they paid both charges and cannot reconstruct which was which. The fix costs nothing today. Require every quote on this lane in four separate columns: base freight, PSS, Hormuz surcharge, local charges at both ends. If a forwarder cannot produce that table this week, that tells you something too. And check the billing unit in writing. The notices price per TEU, so confirm whether a forty-foot box bills as two TEU or as one flat unit. On a $1,500 charge, that single question is worth $1,500 per box per month, and it is exactly the kind of ambiguity that turns into a year-end dispute instead of a June email.

Now sit with the stranded number. 41 carrier vessels inside the Strait, holding about 204,000 TEU. Divide one by the other and you get roughly 5,000 TEU per vessel, which is mainline neo-panamax territory, not feeder boats. These are the workhorses of the network. Assume, and I am stating this as an assumption, not a fact, that you have 100 TEU sitting on one of them, cargo value $45,000 per TEU, a middle-of-the-road figure between textiles and consumer electronics. That is $4.5 million of your inventory parked in a queue in hot water. At an 8% annual cost of capital, one month of delay burns about $30,000 in financing alone, before we count missed sales, air freight rescue, or the penalty clause your customer wrote into the supply agreement back in a calmer year.

Then the calendar. All nine major operators are going around the Cape of Good Hope on Asia-Europe, and Gulf cargo shares that geometry. Ten extra days on the long haul is the working assumption most shipping desks carry. Treat it as an assumption, not a published figure, and rebuild your cover around it. If you carried three weeks of stock, you now need close to five weeks to hold the same stockout probability, because the pipeline itself got longer. Two extra weeks of cover on a $4.5 million pipeline is a few hundred thousand dollars of working capital gone quiet. Nobody invoices you for this one, and it lands whether or not your containers ever touch the Strait. Hidden line items are the ones that sink budgets.

One glance at the 251 tankers in transit, even if you ship nothing but boxes. Tanker traffic is the pulse of the Strait. I have no numbers to quote beyond the count, and I will not invent any, but the direction is readable: as long as 251 tankers keep moving, the transit window exists. The scenario to watch is a week where that count thins out and cargo vessels queue behind tighter screening. Energy moves first in that scenario, then bunker adjustment clauses, then the feeder connections inside the Gulf. You will not predict it, so stop trying. Track the count weekly and let the number trigger your plan instead of the headlines.

One more thing about evidence, because it decides whether you negotiate from the front or the back. These moves are notice-driven, not index-driven. Freight indices print transacted prices after the fact; carrier notices print asking prices before it. Notices move first, transactions follow one to two weeks later. Track only the indices and you will always be one cycle behind the people writing the surcharges. On a week-to-month timescale, the notice board is your leading indicator. Reading order for the next month: new notices every Monday, your forwarder's confirmed rates every Friday, and the gap between the two is your negotiating room opening or closing.

Now the action list, dated, because plans without dates are opinions.

By Friday June 26: your forwarder delivers a full-quote sheet for July Gulf sailings, one column per carrier, four lines each, base freight, PSS, Hormuz surcharge, local charges. Your logistics lead owns the reconciliation, not the forwarder. Output is a one-page comparison and a shortlist of the two carriers with the lowest combined surcharge load that also confirm direct sailings in writing.

By Tuesday June 30: contract rate requests go out. Once this lane has moved past $1,200, it should be locked. $1,500 is the published ceiling and ceilings are for negotiating down from. Threshold in writing: any carrier pricing PSS plus Hormuz under $1,200/TEU with confirmed space gets 60% of your August volume, the remaining 40% stays unallocated for flexibility. Lock through September 30. Purchasing and logistics sign the request together, because the rate is only half the contract, the other half is space. A cheap rate with no space is a lottery ticket, and Q3 is not the quarter to buy those.

By Saturday June 27: reconcile every open shipment against the stranded-vessel picture, the 41 ships. Cargo on a held ship means three written requests to the carrier the same day: estimated sail or berthing date, waiver of detention and demurrage for the held period, and a delay certificate for insurance. Free-time applications have a habit of expiring quietly two weeks after an event, and a delay certificate requested in July for a June stranding has a way of not existing. Do it now, not after the weekend.

By June 30: purchasing rebuilds the Gulf replenishment plan on the ten-day assumption. Safety stock moves from three weeks to five on the SKUs where a stockout actually costs you a customer. Rank by stockout cost, not by container fill rate. High-margin urgent items move first, bulky low-value items ride the next cycle. Buy insurance where the downside lives, not everywhere at once, or your working capital line will complain before your customers do.

Before the first week of July closes: every open Gulf quotation, sales contract, and letter of credit gets a freight-clause review. Who bears surcharges introduced after the contract date, and up to what cap. If your sales price is fixed and your freight is floating, you are running a small currency desk without the commission. A one-line clause, surcharges above $X per TEU split fifty-fifty above a threshold, costs one email today and saves a quarterly negotiation later.

Weekly, every Friday through September: one dashboard, four numbers. Hormuz surcharge ladder by carrier, straits.live in-transit and stranded counts, your confirmed versus notice rate gap, days of cover on your top ten Gulf SKUs. Review takes fifteen minutes. Two consecutive Fridays of a falling tanker count or a new carrier joining the surcharge ladder at a higher rung, you accelerate the next lock-in round instead of waiting for month end.

The alternatives, priced honestly. Air freight on the Gulf lane is not a plan, it is a punishment; unless your cargo value per kilo supports it, forget it before you price it. Waiting for the surcharge to fall is the second trap. The ladder moved up three rungs in one week and nothing in the traffic data says down. If the 41 stranded vessels clear and the tanker count holds, you might see the floor carriers trim $100-$200 to defend volume, and that is a trimming scenario, not a reversal. Land bridge options, meaning Gulf discharge then overland, exist on paper for some cargo but they add a border and a trucking leg, and both legs price their own risk premium in a week like this. The honest alternative list is short: split volume across the surcharge ladder, push delivery dates left where your customers allow, and let the unurgent freight wait out the peak in a bonded warehouse near the buyer instead of on the water.

And the traps, since somebody always steps on them. Detention and demurrage during a stranding: get the waiver in writing before the vessel moves, not after the invoice. Insurance cover: confirm whether your cargo policy's war-risk clause covers the Strait transit at all, because if it excludes the zone, the delay certificate you requested is decoration. Charge accounting: make sure the Hormuz surcharge books to its own cost line, not buried in freight, or Q3 margin analysis will tell you a fairy tale about your Gulf lane. Documentation: rerouted vessels change ports of call, and a bill of lading that names a transshipment port that no longer exists slows customs down faster than a missing packing list.

The supply chain lesson out of all this is old and boring and true: the market pays for uncertainty first and distance second. Six carriers looked at the same 41 stuck ships and priced them six different ways, which tells you the pricing is about fear and capacity, not about the water. The shippers who do well out of weeks like this are the ones who treat a surcharge ladder as a menu, lock the middle rungs early, and keep a little volume unallocated so they can move when the ladder moves again.

I will leave you with the cold bit: it is called a strait because it is narrow. Rates, apparently, did not get the message, they went wide.

Keep the four-column quotes, keep the Friday dashboard, and keep your unallocated 40%. The strait decides the risk. The ladder decides the price. Where do the surcharges actually sit in your contract language, and why does it matter this much? Because the Hormuz charge is new, most standing supply agreements signed before June say nothing about it. That silence defaults the cost onto whoever the Incoterms put it on, and if you buy FOB, that somebody is you, from the moment the container crosses the ship's rail.

Pull every open Gulf contract this week and look for one word: cap. A contract with no surcharge cap is an open cheque with your signature already on it. If the counterparty resists a cap, negotiate the split instead: surcharges above an agreed threshold shared fifty-fifty, applied only to sailings after written notice. Two suppliers out of ten will push back hard, and those two are telling you something about how they handle cost in general, which is worth knowing before the next crisis, not during it.

Inside the Gulf itself there is a second bill that the TEU numbers hide. The big carriers' $750-$1,500 run to the major hub ports; what happens after transshipment, the feeder or barge leg into the smaller terminals, prices its own screening and insurance, and nobody's notice covers it. Ask your forwarder one direct question: is the Hormuz surcharge through-rated to my final port of discharge, or port-to-hub only? Get the answer in writing with the quotation. The difference can be several hundred dollars per container, billed at destination where you have the least leverage, and it will arrive on an invoice stamped with a charge name you never agreed to. Destination charges are where surcharge disputes go to hide.

Budget view, since finance will ask by July anyway. Take the $94,000-a-month worked example and read it as a run rate, not a spike. If the ladder holds through September, that is three more months of it, call it $280,000 on one lane, and if the Cape routing holds into August planning, your Q3 freight budget for Gulf plus Europe needs roughly the Cape assumption built in, not the pre-June one. Companies that budget Q3 on pre-June rates will discover the gap in September variance reports, after the money is spent and only the explanation is left. Send finance the ladder this week, with the two threshold numbers, $1,200 for the lock-in trigger and $850 for the PSS midpoint, so the budget line and the market have at least met each other before the quarter starts.

One distinction worth a paragraph: transshipment versus direct. On a normal week the trade-off is price against schedule, and cheap transshipment wins often enough. In a week where 41 ships are held inside a strait, every transshipment point is a place your container can stop moving while two carriers argue over who rebooks it. The cheap routing that adds a hub also adds a second queue. My rule for messy quarters: pay the direct sailing premium for the cargo with a date attached, and let the flexible cargo ride the hubs. Split roughly by revenue urgency, not by which booking was easiest to make on a Friday afternoon.

Free time deserves its own minute. When 204,000 TEU eventually moves, it moves all at once, into terminals that will be congested from the first day. Congestion at destination is where detention and demurrage bills are minted. Your defense is arranged before the ship berths: confirm your destination free time now, in writing, on every open Gulf booking. Standard free time runs a few days at most terminals; in a congestion week you want a buffer, not a default. One email per booking this week, and if your forwarder says it cannot be changed, ask whether the carrier congestion program applies, because most of the big lines run one when a disruption is this public. It costs nothing to ask, and the question itself signals that you read notices.

A word on the 280 cargo ships figure, because context changes its meaning. Seven hundred seventeen vessels in transit sounds crowded, but the operative number for a container shipper is the composition: 280 cargo against 251 tankers means the commercial traffic roughly balances the energy traffic right now. That balance is the healthy state. Watch for it tilting, tanker count falling faster than cargo count, because that tilt is the earliest public signal that screening has tightened. You get no notice from any carrier about screening changes; the traffic mix is the notice. It is free, it updates daily, and almost nobody outside the energy trade looks at it. That is exactly why it is useful to the rest of us.

The per-TEU math also depends on your box mix, and it is worth thirty seconds. The notices price per TEU, so a forty-foot container nominally carries double the charge of a twenty-foot. If you stuff forty-footers at low utilization, the surcharge per cubic meter gets ugly fast. Two practical responses: raise the fill rate on the forty-foot boxes first, since every percent of fill dilutes a fixed charge; and question whether any twenty-foot booking can be consolidated into a neighbor's forty, even at the cost of a shared-space agreement. On a $1,500 rung, a forty-foot box carries $3,000 of surcharge; fill it to 90% instead of 60% and the surcharge per cubic meter drops by a third without negotiating a thing. Rate negotiation gets the headlines, but box math is the discount you control unilaterally, starting today.

You decide which rung to stand on.

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— By Vivian Zhao