Carriers Stack New Peak Season Surcharges on Africa, North America and Asia-Mediterranean Trades

The Analysis

Five hundred and fifty dollars a TEU, one thousand eight hundred to two thousand dollars a container, up to two thousand one hundred dollars a container, and five hundred euros per cancelled booking. Those are the four numbers in this week's filing batch from CMA CGM, Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd, landing on Africa, North America and North Europe exports between late June and mid-July 2026. Let us work out what they cost, because the announcements do not say.

Three of the four are charges on cargo that moves. The fourth, the five hundred euro cancellation fee, is a charge on cargo that does not. That distinction sounds pedantic and it is the most useful thing on the page. Surcharges you can forecast and argue about. A cancellation fee changes what your team does on a Tuesday morning, and behaviour is much harder to budget for than freight.

The second thing to say before any arithmetic: these four numbers are not in the same unit. Five hundred and fifty is per TEU. One thousand eight hundred to two thousand is per container. Two thousand one hundred is per container. Five hundred is in euros and per booking. Put them in one column, add them up, and you get a number that is wrong in a way nobody catches until August. I have watched that happen more than once, and it is always the same spreadsheet.

Take the Southern Africa number first, because it is the largest per box. Assume you run 20 containers a month into Southern Africa on the Maersk filing. Assume the charge applies per container as billed, and that it stacks on the base rate you already pay rather than replacing part of it. At $1,800 a container that is $36,000 a month and $108,000 a quarter. At $2,000 it is $40,000 a month and $120,000 a quarter. That is the size of the problem before anybody does anything clever, and it belongs on one line in front of whoever owns the freight budget, because nothing focuses a conversation like a quarterly figure with five digits.

Now test how much that depends on the assumptions, because it depends on them completely. If the charge is per TEU rather than per container and your boxes are 40ft, the same 20 boxes cost $72,000 to $80,000 a month. If it applies only to bookings made on or after the effective date, your first month is light and the full amount lands in month two. Same filing, three possible invoices, anywhere from $36,000 to $80,000 a month. Do not reforecast off the middle of that range. Get the unit and the trigger in writing first.

The trigger question is boring and it is worth more than most of what follows. A surcharge filed as effective late June to mid-July can be triggered by booking date, by sailing date, or by bill of lading date, and carriers do not all use the same one. Assume your booking was made 20 June and the vessel sails 12 July under a filing effective 1 July. On a booking-date trigger you are clean. On a sailing-date or bill-of-lading trigger you are not. On 20 boxes at $1,800 that single convention is $36,000. It is one email to your carrier rep, and it is the highest-return email you will send this week.

The $550 CMA CGM figure on China to Mozambique needs its own paragraph, because something about it does not sit right next to the Maersk number. $550 a TEU against $1,800 to $2,000 a container is a spread of roughly 3.3 to 3.6 times, on destinations in the same broad region. Either the two filings cover different scopes, one being a single peak season surcharge and the other a cumulative bundle of several filings, or Mozambique is about to move a lot further than $550. I cannot tell you which from the announcement, and neither can anyone who has not read the tariff text. What I can tell you is that the gap is far too wide to be a rounding difference, and that using $550 as the Africa number for your whole Southern and East Africa book is exactly the mistake I expect most teams to make this week. Ask for the full stack, not the headline line.

That last word matters. The filing describes the steepest cumulative increases on South and East Africa trades. Cumulative is the operative word. It means several filings layered on top of each other, not one number. I have no congestion or capacity data for any African port this week, so I am not going to invent any. What I will say is that a cumulative stack is by definition larger than its largest single component, which means your Africa exposure is a sum you have not yet been shown, and the $550 headline is probably the first term in it rather than the total.

Size the error that produces. Assume you ship 10 TEU a month to Mozambique. At the headline $550 that is $5,500 a month and $16,500 a quarter. Assume the real cumulative stack turns out to be closer to the Maersk level per TEU, and the same 10 TEU is $18,000 to $20,000 a month, $54,000 to $60,000 a quarter. The gap between those two cases is $37,500 to $43,500 a quarter on ten boxes. That is the price of not asking one question.

Now the North America piece. Hapag-Lloyd has raised North America GRIs by up to $2,100 a container. Up to is carrying a lot of weight in that sentence. A general rate increase filing is a grid: different amounts for different origin and destination pairs, different amounts for dry, reefer, open top and out of gauge. Up to $2,100 means $2,100 is the largest cell in the grid. It is not the average and it is almost certainly not your cell. Assume your pair sits mid-grid and you are looking at roughly half. Assume you are on a mainstream dry pair and you may be near the top. Nothing but a written quote separates those two cases.

The arithmetic on that trade. Assume 30 containers a month. At the full $2,100 the exposure is $63,000 a month and $189,000 a quarter. At half of it, $1,050, it is $31,500 a month and $94,500 a quarter. The spread is $94,500 a quarter and it turns on one question you can answer with one email. This part of the job is not strategy. It is admin, and admin is where the money is.

Then the EUR 500 cancellation fee on North Europe exports, which I find the most interesting of the four because it is not a rate. It is a charge for changing your mind. In a tight market the instinct is to book wide, hold space you are not sure you will use, and release it later. Once releasing costs EUR 500, that instinct has a price tag. Assume your team books 12 boxes a week to hold options and typically releases three. That is EUR 1,500 a week, about EUR 6,500 a month, about EUR 19,500 a quarter, for space that was never used. Holding space is not free any more.

Note the currency while you are at it. EUR 500 is not $500. At whatever rate your finance team uses it is somewhere north of that, and it moves every week. If your freight budget is denominated in dollars and this fee is billed in euros, you have quietly taken an unhedged currency position on top of a behavioural penalty. It is a small number. Small numbers with no owner are how freight budgets actually get blown.

Put the three freight items together and the quarter takes shape. Southern Africa, $36,000 to $40,000 a month on 20 boxes. Mozambique, $5,500 a month on 10 TEU at the headline, more if the stack is deeper. North America, $31,500 to $63,000 a month on 30 boxes. Added at the midpoints you are somewhere around $80,000 a month of incremental charge on a mid-sized book, before any base rate movement, before currency, and before the cancellation behaviour. If your third quarter plan was built in May, it does not contain this.

Now translate that into something a commercial team recognises. Assume a 40ft box carries 4,000 units of your product. A $2,100 charge is $0.53 a unit. A $2,000 charge is $0.50 a unit. An $1,800 charge is $0.45 a unit. Assume a 20ft box carries 1,800 units, and the $550 a TEU figure is $0.31 a unit. Those four numbers are the whole wave expressed in the only unit your pricing people actually argue about. If your product margin is thinner than $0.53 a unit after everything else, this filing is not a freight problem, it is a pricing problem, and it needs to go to the people who set prices rather than the people who book containers.

That is also the point about timing. The real trouble with a surcharge wave is not the size of any single number, it is when it lands. These were filed to take effect between late June and mid-July, which means part of the wave is already in force today, 28 June, and part of it lands over the next two to three weeks. Anything already effective is not a forecast, it is an invoice. Anything effective in mid-July is still a decision you can influence, because you can move bookings forward.

So split the book into three buckets and keep them separate. Bucket one, booked and sailing before the earliest effective date: probably clean. Bucket two, booked before and sailing after: this is the trigger question, and it is usually the biggest bucket. Bucket three, not booked yet: this is the only bucket where you still have choices. Put a number on each before Friday. Most teams find that bucket two is 60 to 70 percent of their exposure, and most of them find it after the invoices arrive.

Under all of this sits a contract question that matters more than the numbers. Is your agreement all-in, or base plus surcharges as filed? If it is base plus surcharges, every dollar above is yours. If it is all-in, the carrier absorbs what it filed, until the next round. Assume your contract is silent, which is the common case, and assume the default is pass-through. Your fixed-rate agreement is then not as fixed as the cover page suggests. Pull the contract, find the surcharge clause, read the list of named charges. If PSS and GRI are named, you are exposed. If the clause says all charges as filed, you are fully exposed.

Rough sizing of that. Assume 60 percent of your volume is on fixed-rate agreements and 40 percent on spot. The spot 40 percent re-prices immediately. The contract 60 percent re-prices only to the extent the contract allows, which on a silent clause usually means all of it, one to two months late. That lag is worth something. It is not worth the full delta, and budgeting zero increase on the contract portion is the most common forecasting error I see in a wave like this.

One more check while you are in the contract: the customer side. Find out what share of your sales agreements allows freight to be passed through, and on what notice. Assume half of them do and half do not, and assume the half that do require 30 days notice. On the $80,000 a month figure above, the share you cannot pass through is margin, and the 30 days notice means the ones you can pass through still cost you a month. That is a commercial conversation, not a logistics one, and it has a deadline attached to it.

Now the alternatives, and the traps in each.

Consolidation is the first lever, because three of the four charges are per container. Assume you move 1,000 cubic metres a month into Southern Africa across 20 boxes, 50 cubic metres each. Assume your loading plan can safely take those boxes to 55 cubic metres without breaching weight limits, stacking rules or damage rates. One thousand divided by 55 is 18.2, so 19 boxes. One fewer box at $1,800 to $2,000 saves $1,800 to $2,000 a month and $5,400 to $6,000 a quarter, for the cost of a better loading plan. On a per-container charge, fill rate is a freight-rate lever, and it is the cheapest one you have.

The trap in that lever is time. Denser loading takes longer to plan and longer to stuff. Assume consolidation adds a day to your cut-off. If a day of delay costs more than the $1,800 you saved, you have moved money from one pocket to the other. Run that comparison before you change the plan, and run it per shipment, because the answer for a full-range order is not the answer for a single-SKU replenishment.

Carrier split is the second lever. Three carriers filed, and they did not file the same amounts or the same dates. CMA CGM at $550 a TEU on Mozambique, Maersk at $1,800 to $2,000 a container on Southern Africa, Hapag-Lloyd at up to $2,100 on North America. Those are different trades, so it is not a straight price comparison, but it is evidence that the filings are not synchronised. Assume the carrier that has not filed on your specific pair this round is, for this month, the cheaper one. Test it with a quote, and remember the assumption expires the day they file.

The trap in carrier split is service. A cheaper filing on a service that misses your transit window costs more than the surcharge you avoided. Before you move volume for $1,800 a container, price the transit difference in inventory days. Assume 30 days of inventory carry at whatever rate finance uses. If the alternative adds four days, that is four thirtieths of a month of carrying cost per box, and on high-volume low-value cargo that is often larger than the surcharge.

Timing shift is the third lever, and it only works on bucket three. Anything effective in mid-July can be beaten by sailing before the date. Assume 15 boxes that would naturally ship in the second half of July. Pull them into the first ten days of July, if the cargo is ready and the space is there, and the filing never touches them. At $1,800 a container that is $27,000. It is also the lever with the most operational risk, because pulled-forward cargo sits in a warehouse or on a quay at the destination for two or three extra weeks.

So price the pull-forward honestly. Assume three weeks of extra holding at destination. Assume your destination warehousing runs at a known rate per cubic metre per week. Take 15 boxes at 50 cubic metres, 750 cubic metres, times three weeks, times your rate, and compare it against $27,000. If holding is cheaper, pull forward. If it is dearer, pay the surcharge. That is not a clever answer, it is the only honest one, and it is why the pull-forward call has to be made shipment by shipment rather than as a policy.

The fourth lever is the one nobody wants, which is that some of this cargo does not need to move this quarter at all. A $1,800 surcharge on a box of slow-moving stock is a permanent cost against a temporary inventory decision. Assume a box holds 50 cubic metres of a line turning four times a year. One thousand eight hundred across 50 cubic metres is $36 a cubic metre of one-off cost on stock you were not obliged to buy this quarter. If the margin on that line is thinner than $36 a cubic metre after everything else, the right answer is not to ship it, and no amount of negotiation changes that.

On the cancellation fee there is no lever, only a rule. Once releasing space costs EUR 500, speculative bookings have to be justified like any other spend. Assume your hit rate on held bookings is 70 percent, so three in ten get released. On 12 held bookings a week that is about 3.6 releases, roughly EUR 1,800 a week. The rule writes itself: hold space only where the value of having it exceeds EUR 500 times the probability of releasing it. Below that line, book when you are certain. Above it, book and pay for the option. Write it down, because otherwise every booking becomes an argument between planning and sales.

Documentation is where the August disputes come from. Three carriers, four charges, several effective dates, two currencies, per TEU against per container. When the invoice arrives and it is $12,000 more than the plan, the only thing that settles it is a written quote naming every charge, its amount, its unit and its trigger date. Ask for that now, per pair, per carrier. Assume it takes your forwarder two days. It is the cheapest insurance in this entire exercise.

One more trap, and it catches the people who think they have already handled this. A surcharge filed on your trade can reach you through a forwarder tariff that carries its own version of the charge, with a different name and sometimes a markup. Assume the number in the carrier announcement is not the number on your invoice until you have checked. Reconcile one month, line by line, and if the two differ by more than the filing itself, ask why in writing.

Then there is the internal reporting problem. Charges that arrive as surcharges get coded to freight and blended into a rate, and once they are blended nobody manages them. If you want these managed rather than absorbed, they need their own line. Assume finance can add two codes, one for peak season surcharges and one for general rate increases. One month of clean data on those two lines tells you more than any index does, because it is your book and not somebody else's composite.

And a word on what not to do. Do not wait for the wave to pass. The window runs to mid-July, which means there is at least one more round after this one, and three carriers filing across three trades in the same fortnight is a signal about what they expect demand to do through the third quarter. Their conviction is not your forecast. It is free information and you should treat it that way.

Here is where I land. The numbers are big enough to be a budget event and small enough to survive if you act inside ten days. The EUR 500 is the one that will quietly cost the most, because it is behavioural and nobody budgets behaviour. The unit mismatch between $550 a TEU and $1,800 to $2,000 a container is the one most likely to produce a wrong forecast. And booking date against sailing date against bill of lading date is the single question with the largest dollar value attached to it this week. Everything after that is arithmetic you can do on a Monday morning.

Freight budgets rarely die on the number in the announcement. They die on the unit somebody assumed instead of asked about, which is more or less how this industry has always worked, and will keep working long after this particular wave has a name and a date attached to it.

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— By Vivian Zhao