Evergreen Publishes Holiday Schedule for Key Loops

The Analysis

Evergreen published a holiday schedule for its key loops. That is the entire filing, and it contains two claims. Sailings are being concentrated before and after the break to limit idle tonnage. The carrier says the pattern supports a faster restart once exports resume. No vessel names. No voyage numbers. No cut-off times. No rates. Not one figure I can put on a spreadsheet. If you are waiting for the notice to tell you what to do, it will not. It is a schedule, and a schedule only becomes money when you lay your own calendar next to it.

It is dated 10 February 2026. The Lunar New Year in 2026 falls on 17 February. The notice does not name the holiday, so I am inferring it from the date, and I am telling you that I am inferring it, because there is a difference between what a carrier said and what I worked out. If the break is the Lunar New Year, this landed one week before the holiday. A week is not a planning horizon. A week is a reaction window, and reaction windows are where importers and exporters lose money that never appears on a freight invoice.

So here is what I want you to do with it. Turn the sailing table into your own shipping calendar: the last workable sailing before the break, the first workable sailing after it, the hole in between, and the free-time clock that keeps running while everybody is away. Then price the hole. We can do all of that without inventing a single number, because the arithmetic needs your data, not theirs. And the answer it produces is a set of dates and thresholds you can act on this week.

The first thing to notice is what the notice is actually about. Limiting idle tonnage is a carrier problem, not a shipper problem. A vessel sitting through a break earns nothing, so the schedule is pulled tight around the holiday: more departures packed into the days before, more departures packed into the days after, a thin middle. That is a rational decision about the party that owns the ships. It does not follow that it is a rational decision for the party that owns the cargo. Concentration does two things to you. It builds two peaks where bookings fight for space, and it opens one hole where nothing moves at all.

Two peaks and one hole is the whole shape of your next month. Everything below is arithmetic on that shape.

Before the arithmetic, read the table properly. A holiday schedule is a list of departures per loop, and the concentration the carrier describes will show up as departures clustering at the edges with the middle either empty or marked as a void sailing. When you open yours, mark three columns next to every departure: ETD, cargo cut-off, documentation and VGM cut. If the published table only gives you the first column, the other two still exist and you need them from the local office on the phone, today, because every calculation below starts from the cut-off rather than from the departure.

Start with the peaks. A sailing table gives you ETDs, and what you actually need is not the ETD, it is the last moment at which you can still do something. Work backwards. Assume the cargo cut-off sits 48 hours before ETD, and assume the documentation and VGM cut sits 24 hours before that. Those are my assumptions and they are deliberately generic: real numbers differ by port, terminal and service, and your booking note has the real ones. The method does not change. Take the ETD you were given, subtract the real cut-offs, and you have the last hour your factory can finish loading.

Now put a date on it. Assume the last usable pre-break ETD is 15 February. The cargo cut-off lands on 13 February. Documentation lands on 12 February. Your containers have to be packed, sealed and trucked by 11 February. Today is 10 February. That is one working day of real room. If you are reading this on the day the notice went out, the pre-break window is no longer a planning exercise, it is a scramble, and scrambles are expensive in a specific way: you pay for them in premium space, in overtime, in trucking booked at short notice, and in boxes that reach the gate early and then sit there.

Arriving early is not free, and this is the piece most people miss. Export storage at the terminal starts when the box enters the gate, not when the ship sails. If concentrated scheduling means your vessel departs two days later than the slot you planned for, those two days of storage at origin are usually yours, not the carrier's. Read your booking terms before you assume a delayed sailing is the carrier's storage bill. It almost never is.

Then the hole. Assume the last pre-break ETD is 15 February and the first post-break ETD is 24 February. That is nine days with no departure on your loop. Nine days of production has to go somewhere. Assume you ship 20 containers a week, which is about 2.9 a day. Nine days is roughly 26 containers that either leave before the break, sit in a yard, or get pushed onto the first sailing out. Then the first sailing out is carrying its normal week plus that backlog, the second is carrying the overflow, and the third is still clearing it. This is why recovery after a break takes longer than the break itself, and why a faster restart announced by a carrier is not the same thing as a faster restart experienced by a shipper.

Let us do the math. Assume a container of your cargo is worth 200,000 dollars, and assume your cost of capital is 8 per cent a year. That is 43.8 dollars a day per container in carrying cost. Assume yard storage at origin of 15 dollars per container per day. Nine days of delay is 394 dollars of capital plus 135 dollars of storage, call it 529 dollars per container. Add whatever your customer contract charges for late delivery: if it is 1 per cent of order value, that is another 2,000 dollars and it dwarfs everything above, so check the contract before you spend a week optimising the freight line.

Now put rollover risk on top. Concentrated sailings before a break are oversubscribed by definition, because every exporter on the loop is trying to use the same handful of departures. Assume the last pre-break sailing is 20 per cent oversubscribed. Assume that if you are rolled you land on the first post-break sailing, nine days later. Your expected cost of being rolled is 0.2 times 529, which is about 106 dollars per container. That number is your line. Any guaranteed-space premium below roughly 106 dollars per container is worth paying at those assumptions. Above it, take the risk. This is what a threshold is for. You are not guessing whether rates will rise, and you are not writing that rates rising has an impact. You are comparing a certain cost today against a probability-weighted cost later, and the answer is a number you can put in front of your finance director.

The formula generalises, so write it on the wall: the line equals rollover probability times gap days times the sum of daily capital cost, daily storage and daily contract penalty. Recompute it with your own inputs every time a holiday schedule appears, because the shape is the same every year and only the inputs move.

Here is where it gets practical. If a guaranteed-space premium is quoted at 150 dollars per container, that number does not look right. It sits 44 dollars above the line I just computed at my assumptions, and those 44 dollars buy you nothing that the 106 dollars did not already buy. Cross that line and you lock; do not cross it and hope. Hope is not a procurement strategy.

Now the free-time clock, which is where holidays quietly cost the most money. Demurrage and detention are two different clocks and people mix them up constantly. Demurrage free time covers the box while it sits inside the terminal. Detention free time covers the box while it sits outside the terminal, in your yard or on your truck. Different start points, different rates, different party in control. The question that matters over a holiday is whether those clocks stop. In most markets they run on calendar days and they do not stop. Some carriers publish a holiday extension. This notice, as given to me, talks about sailings and says nothing at all about free time. So the first sentence out of your mouth when you call the line is: is import and export demurrage and detention suspended over the break, until what date, and can I have it in writing.

Here is the arithmetic, with numbers I am inventing so the method is visible. Assume destination free time of four days for demurrage and seven days for detention. Assume demurrage is billed at 100 dollars per container per day and detention at 80 dollars per container per day. Assume your container is discharged on 14 February and the holiday runs from 17 to 23 February with no trucking and no customs. Demurrage free time expires on 18 February. From 19 to 24 February is six days at 100 dollars, which is 600 dollars. Detention free time expires on 21 February, and if you return the box on 26 February that is five days at 80 dollars, which is 400 dollars. One container, one holiday, 1,000 dollars, and none of it appears on the freight invoice you negotiated so carefully in January.

There are two ways out of that, and both are calendar decisions rather than rate decisions. One is to not arrive before the break at all: push the booking to the first post-break sailing so that discharge lands after the holiday and free time runs against a working week. The other is to make sure that if you do arrive before the break, everything downstream of discharge is pre-arranged: pre-clearance where it is allowed, a trucking slot booked before the holiday starts, and a driver who is actually working on the first day the terminal opens. The second option costs planning time. The first option costs nine days. You choose between them using the 529 dollar figure above, not using optimism.

Then the post-break first sailing, where price and space fight each other. Do not forecast it. Set thresholds. Let P be the rate you actually paid on the last pre-break sailing. If the first post-break sailing is quoted at or below P times 1.10, ship after the break and eat the gap. Between 1.10 and 1.25, split it: lock the urgent half on the last pre-break sailing and let the rest wait. Above 1.25, lock everything you can on the pre-break side and treat the post-break sailings as a release valve for non-urgent cargo. Those bands are arbitrary in the sense that I chose them, and useful in the sense that they force a decision before the market makes it for you. Move the bands to fit your own margin.

Space goes before price, and this is the part people get wrong in every cycle. Price is a money problem and you can negotiate money. Space is a calendar problem and you cannot negotiate a date. If you are choosing between chasing a better rate and confirming a booking, confirm the booking. A rate you did not get is a rounding error next to a container that sits for nine days.

Notice also that the two peaks are not symmetric, which changes where you spend. Before the break the binding constraint is production: you can only ship what your factory has made, so your money goes into overtime, into pulling orders forward, and into trucking. After the break the binding constraint is vessel capacity: the cargo exists, the space does not, so your money goes into guaranteed space and into accepting a premium. Spending on overtime in the post-break week is wasted, and spending on space guarantees in the pre-break week is usually unnecessary. Same holiday, two different budgets.

Documents run on the same clock, and they are the reason a perfectly good booking still fails. On-board date, bill of lading instructions, telex release, and whatever dates your letter of credit sets all sit somewhere relative to the break. If the credit sets a latest shipment date inside the holiday window, or a presentation period that expires while the bank's documentary department is shut, the holiday does not extend it unless the credit says so in terms. Read the credit this week, not on 16 February. On operational documents, move every request earlier: file bill of lading instructions before the cut rather than after sailing, and if you need a telex release, ask for it 48 hours before departure instead of after. The document centre that handles your release is also working to a holiday schedule, and it is not the one published for your loop.

Your customer promises are on the clock too. If your sales team quoted delivery dates in January using a transit time that assumed a normal February, those promises are now wrong, and they became wrong on the day this schedule was published. The cheapest correction is a message to the customer today with a revised date. The most expensive correction is a claim in March.

Now the alternatives, and what each one actually costs. Changing port: feeder ports frequently close completely through a break while the main hub keeps a skeleton gate. A departure shown on 20 February is not a departure for you if that port's gate does not receive containers between 17 and 23 February. Before you book an alternative port, get three things in writing: gate receiving hours through the break, whether export storage free time is extended there, and whether there is a skeleton customs presence. A cheaper rate at a closed port is just a delayed container with a nicer number printed on it.

Changing mode: air freight across the break. Assume a fully landed ocean cost of 3,000 dollars per container and assume an air rate of 5 dollars per kilogram. The break-even weight is 3,000 divided by 5, which is 600 kilograms. Below 600 chargeable kilograms on a time-sensitive shipment, air wins on pure cost at these assumptions, and it wins by a wider margin once you load nine days of capital cost on top. Above it, ocean still wins and you are back to managing the calendar. The figures are mine for illustration; the break-even formula is the part to keep. Air has its own holiday as well, so the same backward arithmetic applies to cargo terminal acceptance cut-offs, flight schedules and trucking.

Changing where the inventory sits. The nine-day hole either becomes inventory or becomes a delay, and inventory has a location. Holding at origin means factory or warehouse rent plus capital, and you control both. Holding at destination means terminal storage and detention, neither of which you control, billed at the rates in the paragraph above. If you must hold, hold upstream. This sounds obvious and it is ignored every year, because origin storage feels like your own money sitting in your own building, while destination demurrage arrives as an invoice from somebody else and therefore feels like a surprise.

Changing the production plan. The output that would normally ship across a nine-day hole does not have to ship across it. Pull it forward into the two weeks before, or push it into the two weeks after, and tell the customer which one you did. The moment to do this was January. The second-best moment is today, and it is still worth doing, because a revised promise in February beats a missed one in March.

Pitfalls, in the order in which they cost you money. Free time start point: discharge date, arrival date and gate-out date produce three different bills, and you will not find out which one applies until you ask. Holiday extension: absent a written carrier notice, assume the clock is running. Rolled bookings: under most bills of lading a roll is not a carrier default, so your storage, your detention and your delay belong to you. Surcharge basis: terminal handling, documentation, telex release, seal charges and any holiday or overtime surcharge are billed per container or per shipment, and at origin or at destination, and the difference compounds across a holiday. Effective date of a rate increase: whether it attaches to booking date, bill of lading date or departure date decides whether a pre-break booking actually locks a pre-break price. Ask which one before you book, not after you are invoiced.

And one more, because it is the most repeated mistake of the season. A faster restart is the carrier's expectation and it is not a commitment to you. Treat it as an assumption with an error bar. If the carrier says exports will resume quickly once the break ends, build three to five days of slack into your own plan anyway. Slack you do not use costs nothing. Slack you did not build costs you the whole backlog.

What I would do today if this were my book. Pull the last three pre-break ETDs and the first three post-break ETDs on every loop I use, and put the derived cargo cut-offs, documentation cut-offs and factory loading deadlines on one page next to the production calendar. Call the carrier's local office with three questions and keep the answers in writing. Compute my own line with my own container value, my own capital cost and my own contract penalty. Book the pre-break space my line says is worth paying for, and stop booking the moment the premium crosses it. Re-quote every delivery promise covering February and the first half of March before the break starts.

The carrier says the pattern supports a faster restart once exports resume. I have no argument with that. I also know that my detention invoice has never once read the carrier's expectations before billing me. Sailings take holidays. Free time does not.

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— By Vivian Zhao