Harbor Notes

112: Why a box from Busan to Rotterdam cost $3,140 this week

Tue, 06 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Three of nine Asia to North Europe loops skipped Port Klang in September. None of them announced a blank sailing. Taken together, the omitted calls pulled about 41,000 TEU of weekly capacity out of the lane, and nobody had to call it a cancellation.

Nordica approaching the Port of Rotterdam, September 2025. Photo: Alf van Beem, CC0.

I found this by doing the dullest possible thing: opening the schedule feeds on a Tuesday and checking, service by service, whether each loop’s rotation still listed the port it listed last month. Three did not. On each, the Klang call was replaced by an extra day at sea, with an unchanged service code and an unchanged first and last port. A reader skimming the carrier website would see a weekly service from Busan to Rotterdam, as before.

The effect on prices was not what you would expect. Removing capacity should raise rates, and for two weeks it did. Then, on the fourth week, spot rates on Busan to Rotterdam fell from $3,450 to $3,140, a drop of 9%, while the contract rate index barely moved. Here is the explanation I believe.

Who blinked

Not every carrier cut capacity quietly. Of the nine loops, three skipped Klang, two added a call elsewhere, and four held rotations unchanged. The ones that held, I would call the confident, and the ones that skipped, the cautious. The distinction matters because the confident carriers are the ones that dropped their spot offers first.

The week of 21 September, the three skipping carriers raised their spot offers by about $120. Two of the four holding carriers cut theirs by $200. By 28 September, the cutters had moved the market. The skippers followed on 1 October, discounting by $310 to fill what was left of the weekly allocation. The result is a net fall, with the cautious carriers having lost money twice: once in the capacity they withdrew, and once in the discount they gave to refill it.

I have a number from a forwarder in Rotterdam which supports this. Of her 40 weekly Busan bookings, 31 went to one of the holding carriers last week, up from 24 in August. She did not choose them for their rotation. She chose them because they were $190 cheaper and her customer asked.

Why contract rates did not move

Contracts are a different animal. A 12-month contract signed in March at $2,880 per box does not care about the October spot. What does move is the behaviour around the contract: a carrier with an unfilled sailing will take spot cargo ahead of a contract holder whose minimum quantity has already been met, since the contract holder will pay the same regardless.

I asked three forwarders whether they had seen this and all three said yes. One put it with some color: “Contract customers are the ones who get told the ship is full. The spot customers get the cheaper box and the earlier loading.” That is not universal, and I would not build a strategy on it. It does explain why contract indexes move so little in a week where the spot lane is moving 9%.

What the $3,140 contains

The all-in figure breaks down as ocean freight $2,380, bunker and low-sulphur surcharges $410, origin terminal handling $190, and forwarder margin and documents $160. The margin is thin because it is a competitive week. Two weeks ago it was $230.

The ocean freight line is the one that fell. In August it was $2,640. The surcharges did not move at all, which is a point I made about the bunker line two issues ago and will keep making. You can fight for a lower ocean rate; the surcharges do not respond to market pressure, only to the formula.

What I would do this week

If you are on spot, book the holding carriers and ask for the following sailing too, because the lowest quotes are for a specific departure and the next one is $90 to $140 higher. If you hold a contract on this lane, ask your carrier whether the Klang omission affects your transit time, and request a written answer.

If you are a forwarder, the question to put to your carrier is whether the three skipping services will resume the Klang call. Two of them will, I think, by the end of October, which would put 27,000 TEU of capacity back and take another $150 out of the spot rate. I would hold off on committing to a fixed price beyond three weeks.

And if you are an analyst, a final small suggestion. The number to watch is not the spot rate, or even the contract rate. It is the gap between them, which this week is $260, down from $570 in June. When it closes entirely, someone has run out of room to discount. It would be a better indicator if it did not take a dull Tuesday to compute.

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111: The Suez detour is now the base case

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The word “temporary” has a half-life in freight. A diversion announced as a two-week measure becomes a quarter, then a season, then a feature of the schedule that nobody mentions because everyone has stopped being surprised. We are at the fourth stage with Suez. The Cape routing is not a detour any more. It is the plan.

The Suez Canal from the International Space Station on 27 March 2021, with the Ever Given lodged across it. Photo: NASA, public domain.

I do not want to make a political argument here. The issue is operational, and the evidence is in the schedule files.

What changed in the data

Six months ago, about 40% of the Asia to North Europe loops I track listed a planned Suez transit in their rotation, with the Cape shown as a contingency. This week, 6 of 38 do. Everything else has the Cape as the base, with a published transit time that now includes the extra ten to fourteen days and, importantly, a published bunker stop at a port on the African coast.

That last detail matters. A carrier that plans a bunker call at Las Palmas or Durban is not improvising. It has negotiated berth slots and supply contracts. You do not do that for a diversion you expect to end next month.

The arithmetic of staying

A round trip on the Cape adds roughly 3,500 nautical miles each way compared with Suez. At 16 knots, that is about 9 days each leg. A service that used to need 9 ships for a weekly cycle now needs 11. The two extra ships come from somewhere: either newbuilds, which are arriving, or tonnage drawn from other trades, which is why Southeast Asia to Africa rates have drifted up by $140 this quarter.

Fuel is the other cost. A 14,000 TEU ship uses roughly 130 tonnes a day at those speeds. Nine extra days of that is 1,170 tonnes, and at $620 a tonne it is $725,000 a leg. Spread across 12,000 boxes, that is about $60 per container, which is exactly why the bunker surcharge on this trade rose by $55 in the same period.

The shipper’s problem

If you are buying on this trade, you already know all of this. The new problem is planning. A transit that was 30 days in 2023 is 42 now, and a safety stock calculation that assumed 30 is wrong by 12 days of inventory. A buyer at a homeware importer told me she moved her reorder trigger from 12 weeks to 14 and found it removed roughly 70% of her expediting costs. It cost her more in warehouse space, about £9,000 a quarter. The expediting savings were £21,000.

The other effect is on schedule reliability. Longer loops have more places to go wrong. In my data, on-time arrival on Cape-routed services is 58%, against 71% for the six services still transiting Suez. A 13 point gap in reliability is worth pricing into any contract, and I do not see it in the contracts I read.

Where I could be wrong

A return to Suez is possible, and would arrive quickly. When carriers decide it is safe, they will announce it a few weeks ahead, and the surge in available capacity as the extra ships are released would push spot rates down by perhaps $400 to $600 on the trade. I think the odds of this before March are low, perhaps one in five, and that planning for it is a mistake for most shippers. Planning for the detour to continue costs you some warehouse space. Planning for the return, if it does not come, costs you a missed delivery.

There is a view among some analysts that the detour is good for carriers, since it absorbs capacity and supports rates. In my reading, it is good for carriers with spare ships and bad for those without, and the strain falls hardest on the mid-sized lines who lack the ships to maintain frequency. Three of them have already reduced a weekly service to every ten days.

For the moment, I treat the Cape as the base case in every model I build, and I treat any Suez return as an upside surprise. The surprise may come, and it is worth being pleased about it when it does. It is not worth waiting for.

110: Reading a carrier's Q3 call in eleven minutes

Tue, 22 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A top-five carrier held its third-quarter call on Thursday. It ran 94 minutes. I have listened to enough of these to know that about eleven minutes contain information a freight buyer can use, and that those eleven minutes are not where the chief executive thinks they are.

The method is not clever. I skip the prepared remarks, which were written by a committee and read by a person who has heard them four times. I go to the question and answer section, and I read the transcript first, because voices lie better than text. Then I listen only to the answers where the analyst asked about a number and got a sentence instead.

Here is what I found, in the order it appears.

At minute 12, the chief financial officer was asked about contract renewals. She said that “volumes under contract for the coming year are in line with historical norms”. That is a sentence with no number in it, and the analyst noticed. The follow-up asked for the percentage, and the answer was 61%, down from 68% a year earlier. That is a seven point drop in contract coverage, which means the carrier is leaving more cargo exposed to spot pricing, and is betting on a recovery.

At minute 31, the head of network planning said the company had “optimised” two services in the quarter. Translate this as: two loops lost a port call each. I checked the schedule feed and found Port Klang omitted on both, from the week of 8 September.

At minute 47, an analyst asked about idle capacity. The answer was that idle tonnage was “at structural minimum”. The company’s own fleet report, filed the same day, showed 2.1% of capacity idle, up from 0.8% in June. These two statements are about the same fleet in the same quarter. The difference depends on what “structural” means, and I have never heard a definition that survived a follow-up.

At minute 58, the first honest sentence: “We would expect to see rates under pressure through the fourth quarter.” No qualifier, no hedging adverb. I listened to it three times. It is rare to hear an executive predict worse numbers without immediately balancing the sentence with a reason for hope. The chief executive added one, about demand in the new year, but it came eleven seconds later.

That is where the free part of this issue stops, because the next three moments are the ones you can act on.

At minute 71, a question about the Suez route produced the most useful thing in the call. The company is planning to keep 70% of its Asia to Europe capacity on the Cape of Good Hope route through the first half of next year. That is a planning assumption, not a prediction, but it is the number their network team is working from, and it tells you what their schedule will look like in January.

At minute 83, the line about capital expenditure. Two vessel orders were deferred by three months. The company called this “prudent”. Deferral of a new build, in a market where average ship age is falling and spot rates are weak, is a sign of a carrier that expects to need less capacity next year than it said last year.

What I would do with it

Three actions, none of them dramatic. If you are negotiating a contract with this carrier, the 61% coverage figure is leverage, because they want volume under contract and you have it. If you ship via the two omitted Port Klang services, plan for a change in transit times from October. If you are watching the fourth quarter for rate relief, take the minute 58 sentence at face value.

One more habit: I write down the questions the analysts asked and did not get answered. This call had four, including one about the share of volume on spot-indexed contracts, which got the answer “we do not break that out”. A carrier that does not break out a number it certainly knows is telling you the number is unflattering. I file those four as open items and check them against next quarter’s slides, where about half of them quietly appear as new disclosures.

The timing method is the point. I keep a stopwatch note of every minute where a number appears that was not in the slides. On this call there were nine such moments in 94 minutes, which is a typical density. Eleven minutes of listening, then, and the rest is for people who enjoy adjectives.

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109: The oldest ship on the loop

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Last month I found a 24-year-old container ship on an Asia to North Europe rotation, sailing in the third slot of a weekly service from Ningbo to Hamburg. It was built in 2002, rated at 8,400 TEU, and has had four names.¹ Its presence tells you something about how carriers manage the end of a cycle, and it is one of the better reasons to look at vessel age in the schedule data.

A gas tanker turns ahead of a container ship at Rotterdam, January 2006. Photo: Alf van Beem, CC0.

Average age figures are published by classification societies and often quoted in carrier presentations. The number on main lanes has been falling for six years, now sitting at 11.2 years. A fleet with a falling average sounds like a fleet that is renewing itself. It is, but averages hide a distribution, and the distribution tells a different story.

The tail

In my sample of 38 services, 31 of the 412 vessel slots over six weeks were filled by ships older than 18 years. That is 7.5%. The ships are scattered, not concentrated: no carrier has more than five, and no service has more than two. The pattern suggests deliberate use, not neglect.

CMA CGM Tosca under the cranes at a Rotterdam terminal, January 2006. Photo: Alf van Beem, CC0.

Three reasons stand out from the planners I spoke to.

First, old ships are cheap to hold. A vessel of that age has been depreciated to near zero in the books. A carrier that has already paid for it faces a charter-equivalent cost of about $9,000 a day, against $38,000 for a modern ship of the same size on a market charter.² On a 14-day rotation leg, that difference is $406,000.

Second, they are useful in specific places. Smaller ships can call at ports where the draught or the crane reach suits them, and they fill the gaps in a rotation when a larger ship goes for dry-dock. An 8,400 TEU vessel does not need a deep berth.

Third, and least discussed, they provide optionality. A carrier that keeps four such ships on the books can put them into service within three weeks if demand rises, without chartering at spot prices. In weeks like this one, when spot rates are falling, they sit idle or at anchor. In weeks when rates spike, they sail.

What the shipper sees

Very little, which is the point. The service code is the same, the schedule is the same, and the vessel name appears on the booking confirmation only if you look. The differences you might notice:

Transit is typically one or two days longer, since older ships run slower to save fuel.
Reefer plug capacity is lower, often by 20 to 30%.
Reliability on schedule is worse, by about six percentage points in my data, though that is a noisy figure.

None of these is disastrous. For a dry container of furniture, nobody would care. For a reefer of produce on a tight shelf life, you would care a great deal, and you would not know to ask.

One planner described it to me as the difference between owning an umbrella and renting one when it rains. The old ships are the umbrellas. They cost almost nothing to keep, and they are very annoying to be without in the one week you need one. The same planner added that the umbrella is also unfashionable, and that no carrier will put its oldest ship in a brochure.

A simple habit

When the booking confirmation arrives, copy the vessel name into a column. Look up its build year once; it takes ten seconds. If you see an age above 18, make a note, and if you see it twice on the same service in a quarter, ask your carrier what is going on. They will say “operational flexibility”, and the question will have done its work.

I keep a list of the oldest ships on each of my tracked services. Currently the record is 24 years, as above. A reader has bet me a lunch that I will find a 27-year-old by Christmas. I have accepted.

The previous names are in public registers. I have left them out because a name change is the carrier’s business, not mine. The ship has also been through two ownership transfers. None of it is unusual. ↩
Charter-equivalent rates are rough figures from the charter market and from conversations with two brokers. Treat the $9,000 figure as an order of magnitude. Book values vary, and some carriers allocate overhead to old ships differently. ↩

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108: The berth window that was not

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Gdynia is a good port to be wrong about, because it is efficient enough that errors look like policy. A reader who runs customs and haulage for a furniture importer sent me a tariff page last week and a question: why does the terminal charge a Saturday gate surcharge of 40 euros when it does not open on Saturdays?

I looked. The terminal’s published gate hours run Monday to Friday, 06:00 to 22:00, with Saturday listed as “by appointment”. The tariff says a Saturday surcharge applies to “all gate transactions outside Monday to Friday standard hours”. Both documents are correct. Together they describe a charge that applies to a service almost nobody can buy.

Colombo Express at the Altenwerder terminal, Hamburg, at night, July 2009. Photo: Martin Damboldt, CC0.

How it got there

I rang the terminal’s commercial office on Thursday. A pleasant person explained that the Saturday appointment system was introduced in 2019 for a single customer, a feed exporter, whose lorries needed to load before a Sunday vessel. The surcharge was written for that arrangement. The feed exporter left the terminal in 2022. The surcharge stayed, because tariffs get added to and rarely subtracted from, and because nobody wanted to be the person to ask about a 40 euro line.

The reader’s company, however, had been paying it. Not on Saturdays. On Fridays, after 22:00, when a late lorry got through the gate at 22:40. The terminal’s billing system reads any transaction outside standard hours as “Saturday rate”, because that was the only out-of-hours code in the tariff table. He found this by lining up 14 invoices against the gate logs.

The bill

Fourteen late Friday gate-ins over twelve months, at 40 euros each, is 560 euros. A rounding error against annual port costs of about 310,000 euros. He asked for a refund and got one within two days, which suggests the terminal was well aware.

What interested me is the scale of the phenomenon. I asked four other forwarders with Baltic exposure whether they had seen a similar charge in the last year. Three had. One was a “weekend yard handling” fee at a different port that applied on Wednesdays during a crane maintenance window, because the maintenance window had been coded as a weekend in the billing table. Another was a reefer monitoring charge for dry containers. The third, a surcharge of 25 euros for a “hazardous goods inspection” on a pallet of ceramic tiles, was refunded with a note that said “classification error”, which I enjoyed.

A short field guide to tariff errors

If you handle port invoices, here is what I look for, in order of how often it turns up.

A time-based surcharge on a time when the service does not exist. Saturday, public holidays, night shifts at terminals that run two shifts.
A charge for an item the container does not hold: reefer, hazardous, out-of-gauge, overweight.
A storage day counted from the vessel’s arrival and not from discharge, which can add one or two days.
A unit mismatch: per tonne charged as per container, or per TEU applied to a 40-foot box as 2 TEU twice.
A currency conversion done at last month’s rate. This one is rarely an error and always deserves a question.

Of the five, the first is the most common and the least likely to be noticed, because it appears as a small line on a long invoice. Most of the corrections I know about were found by a person with a spreadsheet and a free evening.

Why this is not just trivia

Port tariffs are published documents, but they are administered by systems. Where the two disagree, the system wins, and the document becomes an exhibit. If you are a shipper, the practical thing is to treat any recurring charge you cannot explain as a question for the terminal, not a cost of business.

The reader in Gdynia now sends the terminal a one-line email each month listing out-of-hours transactions and asking for confirmation of the applied rate. It takes him four minutes. Over the last three months it has recovered 120 euros. At his hourly rate, he says, that is about break-even. At mine, it is a better return than most things I do on a Friday evening.

Next Tuesday: a heavier issue on vessel age, and a footnote about the oldest ship I have seen still on a main-lane rotation.

107: Four reader questions about contract renewals

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

September is when the contract questions arrive. By now most shippers have seen two months of falling spot rates and one set of renewal letters from their carriers, and the two do not agree. These are the four questions that came in most often, lightly edited and anonymised.

Should I renew now or wait for the October spot dip?

You are asking whether spot rates will fall further. They might. I would not build a contract strategy around that guess, because the useful question is how far apart spot and contract sit today on your lane, and what it costs you to be wrong in either direction.

On Asia to North Europe this week, the median contract rate for a 12-month deal is about $2,900 against spot at roughly $3,450. A contract that is 16% lower than spot looks like a bargain until you remember that contracts carry a minimum quantity commitment and spot does not. If your volume is steady, take the contract. If your volume swings by more than 30% across the year, the minimum is a trap, and I would move only part of it.

Waiting for an October dip is a bet that has paid off in two of the last five years. In the three it did not, the shipper renewed in November at a rate higher than the one on offer in September. The average cost of waiting, across those five years, was about $90 per box. The average gain was about $210 in the two years it worked. That is close to even, and I suspect it is worth less than the peace of mind of a signed paper.

Can I split my volume between two carriers?

Yes, and most mid-sized shippers should. A common split is 70/30, with the larger share to the carrier that has the better schedule reliability on your lane. The smaller share keeps a second relationship alive and gives you a price reference.

The catch is that carriers see your split. A carrier that receives 30% of your volume will treat you as a secondary customer in a tight week. I have heard this described, by a sales manager, as “the courtesy you pay for being promiscuous”. That seems a little hard. I would say the cost is a slight drop in priority, and that you can limit it by making the minimum for each carrier something you will definitely meet.

What happens if I miss my minimum quantity commitment?

It depends on the contract. The usual remedy is a shortfall payment, commonly $150 to $400 per missing container, or the loss of the contract rate on remaining volume. The shortfall is rarely enforced in the first year of a relationship and almost always enforced in the third.

A forwarder in Gothenburg told me that in 22 years she has seen a carrier waive a shortfall twice. In both cases, the shipper had a larger account elsewhere. I would not rely on goodwill. Read the clause on shortfall carefully, and if there is no cure period, ask for 30 days.

Is an index-linked contract worth the hassle?

Index-linked contracts tie your rate to a published spot index, with a discount or premium. They are less common than they were, and they are good for shippers who can accept a rate that moves every week.

The honest advantage is that you stop arguing about rate cards. The honest disadvantage is that you start arguing about the index. In the contracts I have read, the reference index and the date it is read vary: some use Thursday’s, some the average of the previous week. A one-day difference on a volatile week can be $120 per box. Ask which index, which day, and who corrects errors.

If you like your forwarder and your volumes are modest, a fixed rate with a clean shortfall clause is boring and nearly always sensible. Boring has a good record in freight.

One closing note from the mailbag. Several of you asked whether to trust a carrier’s “final offer” letter. The pattern in my notes is that the second letter is lower than the first by about $60 per box roughly half the time, and that the phrase “final” has no measurable effect on this. Reply politely, ask for the date by which the offer lapses, and if it lapses on a Friday afternoon, reply on Monday.

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106: A council says the quiet part

Tue, 25 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Most shipper association papers are written to be cited, not read. The Northern Shippers’ Council, a body of roughly 300 importers across the Baltic and North Sea, has just published a four-page memo on blank sailings that breaks the habit. Page three contains this paragraph:

Between January and June, our members were notified of 61 cancelled sailings on Asia to North Europe services. In the same period, our members’ own bookings were rolled or cancelled on 140 occasions. The difference, 79 incidents, did not correspond to any announced blank sailing. We believe these represent capacity withdrawn through vessel substitution, port omission, and cargo prioritisation, and we do not believe they were reported in carrier statistics. We therefore request that the Commission treat announced blank sailings as a lower bound.

I like this paragraph because it does arithmetic in public. Sixty-one announced, 140 experienced. The council does not accuse anyone of anything. It simply reports that its members saw more disruption than the carriers announced, and asks a regulator to notice.

What the numbers can and cannot say

Be careful here. The 140 figure comes from 300 members self-reporting through a survey, and the council says the response rate was 58%. A survey of that kind can overcount, because one cancelled sailing may generate three rolled bookings from three members who share the same forwarder. It can also undercount, because a member who was never rolled has no reason to reply.

My own schedule tracking, which I describe in the issue of 21 July, finds a similar gap on a different footing: vessel substitutions without announcement on about one service in eight, over the same period. That is not the council’s data, but it points the same way.

The sentence I would keep

Buried two paragraphs later is a line I think is the real contribution: “A blank sailing is a decision that is announced. A substitution is a decision that is merely made.” That is quotable, a little too neat, and correct. I would put it on a card by your desk next to the weekly rate table.

The memo makes three requests: that the Commission define blank sailings by capacity withdrawn, not by announcement; that carriers report nameplate capacity by sailing; and that the first of these take effect from the next quarter. The third is a hope. The first two are possible, though the second would take a carrier a spreadsheet and some embarrassment.

Next month I will ask three carriers what they make of it. I expect that two will say nothing and the third will send a statement that uses the word “flexibility” four times. I will count.

105: The long life of a single quote

Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On 2 June a forwarder I will call Kestrel Forwarding sent a customer a quote for one 40-foot container from Qingdao to Felixstowe: $3,280 all in, valid for seven days. On 19 July the customer paid an invoice for that box. The invoice said $3,911. Nothing improper happened in between. That is the interesting part.

This issue follows that quote through its seven stages and names the point at which each extra dollar entered. I have the documents, the dates, and the permission of the customer, who wants to remain nameless and a little less surprised in future. It is a long issue, because the story is long. Seven stages, two sailings, one ship that was not the ship anyone expected, and a spreadsheet that nobody updated on a Friday.

I will say now what I think the lesson is, so you can disagree with it as you read: a spot quote is not a price. It is the opening position in a negotiation that continues, silently, for six weeks after you accept it. Most shippers do not notice the negotiation because most of the movements are small and each has a plausible name.

Stage one: the quote

The $3,280 was built from four components. The ocean freight was $2,450. Bunker and low sulphur surcharges added $410. Origin terminal handling at Qingdao was $190. The remaining $230 was the forwarder’s margin and a documentation fee. Kestrel had a contract allocation with a carrier and priced off that, adding its markup. This is entirely normal.

What is less well known is that the ocean freight line was Kestrel’s cost on the day it quoted, and not on the day it booked. The forwarder had a rate sheet dated 28 May. By 2 June, the carrier had issued a new sheet effective 1 June with the ocean rate for that lane at $2,520. Kestrel’s quote still used the 28 May figure. Somebody had not refreshed a spreadsheet, and the cost of that was the forwarder’s to absorb or recover.

Kestrel chose recovery. That will become important in stage five.

Stage two: the booking

The customer accepted on day four of seven. The booking was confirmed for a sailing on 14 June, loaded at Qingdao Qianwan terminal. The confirmation listed the quote value, the carrier’s service code, and a line that read “subject to carrier availability and surcharges applicable at time of shipment.”

That sentence is boilerplate, and it is also the contract. “Applicable at time of shipment” means any surcharge the carrier announces between booking and loading is eligible to appear on the invoice. In this case, none appeared at this stage, but the clause waited.

The booking confirmation also gave a gate-in cutoff of Wednesday 12 June at 12:00. On 10 June the cutoff moved to Tuesday at 18:00. Nobody emailed the customer, because the change was posted to a portal. The customer’s logistics coordinator saw it on Monday afternoon, partly by luck and partly because she keeps the portal open on a second monitor. She told me she has not missed a cutoff in four years and attributes it to the second monitor.

Stage three: the first rollover

The 14 June sailing was full. A container booked on day four of seven, with a lower margin of priority than contract cargo, was rolled to the next sailing on 21 June. This is a common occurrence in a busy week. Carriers roll spot cargo first and keep their relationships with contract holders intact. The customer was told, correctly, that this was a risk of spot booking.

A rollover costs a week of the customer’s time and, under some terms, nothing in money. In this case, the one-week delay moved the cargo into a different billing period for surcharges. The carrier’s peak season surcharge, announced on 4 June, took effect for sailings from 17 June. The rolled container, loading on 21 June, was now inside it.

The peak season surcharge for this lane was $300 per container. Kestrel’s booking was subject to surcharges applicable at time of shipment. So the container now carried $300 more than the one the customer originally booked, through no action of anyone present.

Stage four: the ship

The 21 June sailing was operated by a vessel built in 2013 with a nameplate capacity of 13,800 TEU. It had replaced a newer ship on that service for that week. This had no direct cost for the customer, but it shows how the thing works: the same service code can carry cargo on very different vessels, with different speeds and different reliability.

The older ship had a longer transit by two days because it slow-steamed to save fuel. Arrival at Felixstowe was therefore scheduled for 17 July, and not 15 July as originally told. The customer’s warehouse had slots reserved for 15 July. They kept them, then had to reschedule, and paid $85 to move the booking at the warehouse. This did not appear on any freight invoice, but it is real money and belongs to the quote.

Stage five: the forwarder recovers

When the invoice was assembled, Kestrel needed to recover the $70 difference between its stale rate sheet and the current one. The method it chose is one I have seen at three forwarders: it added an amount to the bunker line, using the phrase “BAF adjustment per carrier notification.” The customer saw a bunker line of $480, not $410, and nothing else about it looked wrong.

There was a real carrier notification. It said the BAF had risen by $12 that month. The forwarder added $70.

I asked Kestrel about this. A manager there said it was a “rounding of the reconciliation,” which is a phrase I admire as one admires a well-made knife. When I pushed, she said the alternative would have been absorbing a loss on a loyal customer, and that on the next quote they gave the customer a lower margin to compensate. I have no way to check that. The next quote I saw did carry a lower margin, by $20.

Stage six: the terminal

At Felixstowe, the container sat for two days longer than planned because the customer’s warehouse slot had been moved. The terminal’s free period was four days. The container used five. One day at $95 appeared on a separate demurrage note from the carrier, and this one the forwarder passed on without markup, with an apology.

Terminal handling at destination, quoted as “excluded” in the original quote, was $265. The customer knew about this and had budgeted for it. It is not part of the $3,911 and I list it only for completeness, because the total cost of the box to the customer was closer to $4,271 after the terminal and the warehouse fee.

A note on the clock, since the dates in this story matter more than the dollars. From quote to invoice took 47 days. The customer’s own payment terms were 30 days from invoice, so the forwarder financed the carrier for about a month and a half before seeing a cent. Kestrel told me its cost of carrying a typical box in that period is $14 to $22. That is not nothing against a $230 margin, and it explains some of the behaviour in stage five without excusing it. A forwarder that is paid late and charged early has every reason to round in its own favour. Shippers who negotiate shorter payment terms, 14 days instead of 30, often find the “rounding” gets smaller. I cannot prove the link. Two forwarders I asked agreed that it exists, and a third said it was a coincidence, then offered me a 14-day deal.

Stage seven: the invoice

Here is how the $3,280 became $3,911.

Component	Quoted	Invoiced
Ocean freight	$2,450	$2,520
Bunker and low sulphur	$410	$480
Origin handling	$190	$190
Peak season surcharge	$0	$300
Forwarder margin and documents	$230	$230
Demurrage, one day	$0	$95
Documentation amendment	$0	$96
Total	$3,280	$3,911

The $96 documentation amendment is a charge for correcting the bill of lading after the rollover changed the vessel name. Carriers charge for this, and forwarders pass it on. It was the only line item that the customer queried, and it was the one that, in my reading, was most defensible.

Of the $631 increase, $70 is the stale rate sheet recovered through the bunker line. Another $70 is the ocean rate difference itself, which Kestrel absorbed in its own mind but invoiced anyway. $300 is the peak season surcharge, entirely a function of the rollover. $95 is demurrage, caused by the late arrival. $96 is the documentation fee. Add them in a different order and you get the same figure.

What the customer could have done

I put this question to the customer’s logistics coordinator. She had three observations.

First, she would have asked at booking for the quote to be “all-in including known surcharges for the sailing date and the following sailing”. Forwarders will often agree to this when asked. She did not ask, because she had not seen a rollover cost money before.

Second, she would have objected to the BAF line. She noticed the $70 but did not challenge it, because the sum was small relative to the box and the relationship with Kestrel was good. She calls this “the tax on being polite”, and estimates that she has paid it a dozen times in six years.

Third, she would have kept the original quote email and the invoice in the same folder. They had been in different folders, which is why it took her until July to see the whole gap.

The version without a villain

It would be easy to read this as a story about a forwarder cutting corners. I do not think that is the right reading, and Kestrel would be an unfair target. Its margin on this box, after the adjustments, was about 7%, which is ordinary. It had a stale rate sheet because its rate team of two people maintains roughly 900 lane sheets, and the carrier issues revisions on a schedule that suits the carrier. The $70 recovery was clumsy, not clever.

The structural point is that every party in the chain is permitted to change its price within a window, and no party is required to tell the next one why. The carrier updates its sheet and tells the forwarder through a portal. The forwarder updates its invoice and tells the customer through a line item. The customer, who has the least information and the most exposure, is the only party who treats the original number as a commitment.

That asymmetry is the whole business model of spot freight, and I do not say this to be cynical. A spot market works because someone is willing to carry price risk. In a spot quote, the shipper carries it, in six small instalments, without being told.

Three questions to put in an email

If you take nothing else from this issue, send these three questions to your forwarder before you accept a spot quote. They cost nothing and they change the conversation.

First: what surcharges are announced but not yet effective for this lane, and do they apply if my cargo rolls to the next sailing? The answer is usually yes, and the question makes the forwarder say so in writing.

Second: what is the date of the rate sheet this quote is based on? If the answer is more than four days old, the quote has probably aged.

Third: if my cargo is rolled, will you notify me within 24 hours, and who pays for the documentation amendment? This one earns its place because nobody has an answer prepared, which means the person you are talking to has to decide, in that moment, what is fair.

What I take from it

The change from quote to invoice here was 19%, which is above the typical range I see but not outside it. Roughly one in six spot shipments I track ends up costing more than 10% above its quote. The causes are not exotic. A rollover is the most common. A late surcharge announcement is next. A forwarder recovering its own earlier error is third and the least discussed.

There is a mild irony in how the industry talks about this. Everyone on the shipper side asks for “price transparency” and everyone on the carrier side promises “full visibility”. Neither word has any weight in the stage between a quote and an invoice, where the real movement happens. A shipper who wants a price that stays put has to buy a price that stays put, which means a contract, a fixed-rate booking with a guaranteed sailing, or a quote with a written clause that says what happens on a rollover.

None of these is free. A guaranteed sailing on that lane would have cost about $180 more on 2 June. The customer would have paid $3,460, and received a container loaded on 14 June, arriving on 15 July, with no peak season surcharge and no warehouse reschedule. In the end she paid $3,911 plus $85 plus $265 at the destination, $4,261 in all, against $3,725 on the guaranteed route. The guarantee would have come out $536 cheaper in total, about three times its price.

That is the part worth taking away, and I would not generalise it. Guarantees cost money in the weeks where nothing goes wrong. They save money in the weeks where something does. The decision is a bet on how often something goes wrong, and my tracking suggests it is about one in six in this market and this season. At those odds, a $180 guarantee against an expected loss of around $100 per box looks marginal, and the answer depends on how much you value not having to read invoices in July.

For next month’s issue I will track a second quote, a smaller and stranger one, through a different forwarder who has agreed to show me the whole file. I do not know yet what is in it. That is the point of doing it.

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104: A short note on a misprinted schedule

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A reader in Gdansk wrote to say that the demurrage free time I quoted last month for one carrier’s Rotterdam terminal, 7 days, was wrong. It is 5. I checked. He is right, and I was working from page 14 of a tariff PDF dated March that has since been superseded.

The PDF has a misprint: page 14 says 7 days, page 31 says 5. Customer service confirmed 5, then said the 7 was “under review”. It has been under review since March.

If you used my number, check your invoices. A reader at an importer in Lodz found 2 days of extra storage on a single box, at $95 a day.

The right answer was on the booking portal, which updates faster than any PDF. I should have looked there first.

103: What the bunker surcharge hides

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Bunker adjustment factors have an air of physics about them. A formula, a published index, a lookup table by trade lane. The implication is that nobody chose these numbers. Somebody did, and last week I spent three evenings comparing the published schedules of five carriers to find out who and how.

The setup is simple. Each carrier publishes a BAF per container, adjusted monthly or quarterly, based on the average price of fuel in a reference period. The formula is a baseline price, a consumption factor, and a trade lane multiplier. Where carriers differ is in the baseline, the rounding rule, and the lag between fuel moving and the surcharge following it.

A forwarder in Antwerp asked me a plain question that started this: “If fuel is down 6% this quarter, why is my BAF down 2%?” The honest answer needs the cut.

The three places where the margin lives

The baseline. One top-five carrier’s baseline is $480 per tonne. Another’s is $520. The surcharge only counts fuel above the baseline, so a lower baseline means the surcharge starts earlier and is larger at any given market price. At $620 per tonne, the first carrier charges for $140 of fuel and the second for $100. That is a 40% difference in the amount of fuel the shipper is paying for, with nothing in the bill to explain it.

The rounding. The carrier I will call Meridian Lines rounds its BAF to the nearest $5, which is neutral. A second, Kestrel Marine, rounds up to the next $10. On a lane with a calculated BAF of $212, the first charges $210 and the second $220. A $10 difference is small per box. On the 36,000 boxes Kestrel moves on that trade each month, it is $360,000.

The lag. Most carriers use a trailing average of fuel prices, with a lag of one to three months. When fuel falls, the lag works for the carrier. When fuel rises, it works for the shipper. Over a full cycle it should roughly cancel. It does not, because carriers that publish quarterly reset their baseline only at their own discretion, and in my sample of eight quarters, six resets happened when fuel was rising.

What the Antwerp question looks like in numbers

The forwarder’s carrier uses a two-month lag and a $10 round-up. Fuel fell by 6% in the reference quarter, but only the second month of the decline reached the formula before the cutoff. Of the 6%, 3.1% got in. The round-up then took back $8. His BAF fell by 2%. Nothing about this is illegal or even unusual. It is also not what “fuel is down 6%” means to a person reading the news.

A way to check your own carrier

You need three items: the carrier’s published BAF table for the last two periods, the fuel index they reference, and a calculator. Compute the BAF the formula gives. If the number you compute is more than $5 below the number invoiced, ask which rounding rule applies.

I did this for my five carriers. Two matched to the dollar. One was $4 high in the carrier’s favour. Two were $10 and $14 high, and when I asked, one of them replied with a corrected table the next morning. The other did not reply, which I note without comment.

Why it matters more now

In a market where spot rates are falling faster than contract rates, as they are this month, the surcharge is the one component that does not follow the market down quickly. It is the stickiest line on the invoice, and the one with the fewest people looking at it. I would rather you looked. A shipper in Lyon told me she now keeps a one-page sheet per carrier with the baseline, the rounding rule and the lag written down, and refreshes it each quarter. It took her an afternoon the first time. In the second quarter she found a $14 per box error on a Mediterranean lane and recovered $5,600 for the year. She says the sheet has the best return of any document in her office, and that nobody else wants to read it.

Next week: a short note on a misprinted schedule, which is the kind of mistake that makes a formula look rigorous by comparison.

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102: Rates by lane, with the asterisks left in

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Every rate table is a small lie told for convenience. This one is no different, except that I have left the footnotes in the cells where you can see them. The figures below are all-in spot rates for a 40-foot container, quoted for loading in the week of 27 July, as a median of the offers I could verify from three forwarders.

Lane	Rate per FEU	Week on week	Quote validity
Shanghai to Rotterdam	$3,610	+$40	7 days
Busan to Rotterdam	$3,450	+$25	7 days
Ningbo to Los Angeles	$2,780	-$60	5 days
Yantian to New York	$4,120	+$110	7 days
Shanghai to Santos	$4,950	+$0	10 days
Port Klang to Jebel Ali	$1,090	-$15	14 days
Rotterdam to New York	$1,860	+$30	7 days
Ho Chi Minh City to Hamburg	$3,880	+$95	5 days

Why Ho Chi Minh City moved most

Southeast Asian origins to North Europe rose faster than the Chinese ones because two loops took their time recovering after a maintenance blank. The $95 increase is a small number in a small week, but it is the third consecutive rise on that lane. A forwarder in Hamburg told me she now books Vietnam cargo on Mondays, because the quotes seem to be refreshed on Tuesdays and she prefers to be wrong before the refresh.

Why Los Angeles fell

The transpacific drop of $60 is the only decline on the list, and it comes with a condition. The lower offers are for a specific sailing that is, I am told, 78% booked, and carriers are discounting the last 22% to fill the vessel. If you ask for the following sailing, you will be quoted $2,870. I include the lower figure because it is real. I would not budget with it.

The asterisks

Shanghai to Santos is flat because there is almost no spot market on the lane. The $4,950 is a price carriers maintain, and shippers pay. Quote validity of ten days is the longest in the table, which says everything.
Port Klang to Jebel Ali is a short-sea lane and behaves differently. Its rate is quoted per week and not per sailing.
Rotterdam to New York includes a $120 documentation charge that some forwarders itemise and others fold in. I have folded it in here. If your quote shows $1,740 and a separate $120, they agree with me.
Yantian to New York uses the all-water route. Via the west coast and rail, the median fell to $3,960 but adds six days.

One habit worth borrowing

A trade lead at a mid-sized importer I know keeps a laminated card by her desk with the same eight lanes and the last twelve weekly rates in pencil. She says the pencil matters, because she has to rub out the oldest number each Tuesday and write the new one, and by then she has actually looked at it. I have no data to say this improves procurement decisions. I note only that she has not been surprised by a rate in three years.

Next week the table gets a second column: what a contract holder on the same lane paid. The distance between the two columns is the subject of most of what I write.

101: Five things in the schedule data this week

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I read sailing schedules the way some people read the weather page: not for the headline, but for what changed since yesterday. A schedule is a promise carriers make to themselves, and the edits to it are where the promises get quietly revised. This week I diffed four weeks of published Asia to Europe and transpacific schedules. Five things came out of it.

Tuesday is the day schedules get edited. Of 212 revisions I logged across 38 services, 71 landed on a Tuesday between 14:00 and 18:00 Singapore time. Carriers do not announce this. It is simply when the network planners finish their weekly meeting and someone has to update the file. If you pull your data on Monday, you are always a week behind the people who pull it on Wednesday.
Three services lost a port call and kept their name. The Asia to Mediterranean loop that used to call Piraeus, Genoa and Valencia now calls Piraeus and Valencia. The service code is unchanged, the rotation count is unchanged, and the transit time to Genoa on the website is still 31 days. Nobody has updated the web page. The schedule feed, however, shows the omission three weeks out, which is where you should be looking.

Here is the part that matters for anyone with cargo booked into Genoa, and it is a short walk from the schedule file to a surcharge.

Vessel substitutions are the real capacity signal. On the third loop I tracked, a 14,000 TEU ship built in 2011 replaced a 15,200 TEU ship built in 2019 for two consecutive sailings. The service code stayed the same. Capacity on that loop fell by 1,200 TEU per week, about 8%, and no notice went out. Shippers who watch only the announced blank sailings will miss this entirely, because there was no blank sailing. There was a smaller, older ship in the same slot.

I now keep a simple column next to every service: the nameplate TEU of the vessel assigned to each of the next six departures. When the number drops and the service code does not change, I flag it. In four weeks that flag fired eleven times. Nine of those were temporary, two were not.

Transit times creep before rates move. For six services, the published port-to-port transit time lengthened by one to three days over the month, spread across several small edits. Added together, that is a slow-steaming decision or a congestion expectation, and neither was announced. In my notes, a two-day increase on a service has preceded a general rate increase announcement by an average of nineteen days across the last two years. That is a small sample, 14 cases, so treat it as a habit of the market and not a law.

A practical use: if a service you rely on adds two days to its published transit, ask your account manager what they know. They will say nothing, and the way they say it will tell you something.

The cutoff times move more than the sailing dates. Container gate-in cutoffs at origin shifted on 29 of the 38 services, usually by 12 or 24 hours earlier. Sailing dates shifted on only 9. A forwarder in Ningbo told me this is the cheapest way for a carrier to protect a tight vessel: the ship leaves on time, but the cargo that would have made it at 10:00 on Friday now needs to be there Thursday at 10:00. Bookings are not cancelled. They are made harder to complete.

If your documentation team works on a standing “Thursday afternoon” rhythm, check the cutoff on each booking confirmation as it arrives, not on the first one you received. I know of one importer who lost a full week of cargo because the cutoff on an email from June was copied into the July template.

What to do with this

None of these five requires a data vendor. The raw schedule files are free, they are published weekly, and a spreadsheet with three tabs is enough: one for vessel nameplate capacity, one for transit time, one for cutoffs. The discipline is the same every Tuesday evening, pull, diff, annotate.

The one piece that does take judgment is deciding which changes are noise. A port call swapped between two terminals in the same city is noise. A port call dropped from a loop is not. My rule: if the change would alter the invoice, it counts. If it only alters the drive, it does not.

Next week I will take this approach to the rate side and show how a published rate card disagrees with the rates people actually pay. There is a table, and the gap on one lane is bigger than I expected.

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100: How an issue is put together

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

$3,450: Busan to Rotterdam spot, 40ft, +$25
38: Asia to North Europe services tracked
07:00: Rotterdam time, every Tuesday

Harbor Notes is back after six months off. Before the first full issue next week, here is how one is built, so you know what to skip and what to trust. Every issue follows the same order: the numbers, the argument, the evidence, and what I would do about it.

Pictures carry a caption and a credit, and they are never decoration. Nordica approaching Rotterdam, September 2025. Photo: Alf van Beem, CC0.

The argument comes first

The second paragraph of an issue says what I think happened. If you read nothing else, read that. The rest of the issue is there so you can disagree with it on the evidence and not on my tone.

Sources, in order of trust

A carrier’s booking system, read on the day.
Its published schedule feed.
A tariff PDF, which is usually right and occasionally months out of date.¹
Anything said on an earnings call.

When I quote a figure, I say which of these it came from. When two of them disagree, I print both.

Tables are the charts

I don’t draw charts. A table of lanes shows the shape of the market and still lets you copy the number.

Lane	All-in spot, 40ft	Change
Shanghai to Rotterdam	$3,610	+$40
Busan to Rotterdam	$3,450	+$25
Port Klang to Jebel Ali	$1,090	-$15

The sources, by how far they run ahead of the weekly index:

Source	Updated	Lag to the index
Booking portal	Continuous	0 days
Schedule feed	Daily	1 day
Weekly spot index	Friday	4 days

On method. A “loop” is one weekly service, counted once however many carriers sell space on it.

What readers send

I booked Vietnam cargo on a Monday after your note on refresh days, and the quote held. Keep the boring tables.

A forwarder in Hamburg

Letters like that one shape what comes next. Short ones, mostly:

a screenshot of a schedule that changed overnight,
an invoice line that does not match the tariff,
a question I can’t answer yet.

Caution. Nothing here is advice on a specific contract. Check the tariff that applies to you.

Free issues end here, with the subscribe form. Members issues go on past a heavy rule, and what follows it is not on this site at all.

What members get after the rule

The members part is where the evidence lives: the full service-by-service table, the tariff lines I compared and the three scenarios I would plan for. It is written for people who have to defend a number in a meeting on Wednesday.

This paragraph exists to show that the cut works. It is removed when the site is built, so it is not in the page or the feed, and the word count above the rule still knows it is here.

Issue 104 is the time it was. ↩

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99: Seven issues in, what the data has said

Tue, 16 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

This is the seventh issue of Harbor Notes, and the last of the year.

The most useful thing to report is the habits that held up. The least comfortable is a forecast I did not get right.

What worked

Reading the schedule file on Monday was the best habit. Of the 63 blank sailings I logged, the earliest signal came from the file, and the average lead over the customer advisory was a week. I intend to keep doing it and to publish the weekly counts in January.

Keeping my own quote table beside a published index was second. The two-day lag was visible after the third week, and several readers have since written to say they found the same on other lanes. One found a lag of four days on a transpacific index, which I have not yet been able to explain.

Third was asking carriers a short, specific question and printing the answer, or the silence. Of the six questions I put to carriers this autumn, four were answered in under a week. The other two are still open. I will list them in the first January issue.

What I got wrong

In the second issue I wrote that four or more new TBN entries on a lane in a week had preceded a spot rise in 5 of 7 cases. In the five weeks since, it has fired twice. One was followed by a rise and one was not. That makes 6 of 9, which is still more than a coin toss and far less than I implied.

I have moved the signal into a column marked “weak” and I will keep updating the count until it is either useful or dead.

What comes next

Two things are on my list for the first quarter. One is annual contract renewals, which start in January and where the most money moves. The other is a proper look at Red Sea routing and how much of the current capacity is a detour in disguise.

Thank you for reading, and for the corrections, which have been more numerous than the praise and more valuable. Issue eight arrives on 6 January.

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98: A carbon line that arrives on the invoice

Tue, 09 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Container ships calling at EU ports have been inside the EU emissions trading system since January 2024. The rule is phased: 40% of reported emissions were covered for 2024, 70% for 2025, and 100% from 2026. The regulation is the same for every carrier. The surcharge that carriers add to your invoice is not.

I collected the published emissions surcharges for the Asia to North Europe trade from five carriers, as listed in their tariffs in November. They range from 38 to 71 dollars per 40-foot box.

Why the range is so wide

A surcharge has to estimate three things: how much fuel a box represents, what share of the voyage is covered, and the price of an allowance. Each carrier makes those estimates differently.

The share covered is the least ambiguous. For voyages that begin or end outside the EU, half of the emissions count. For voyages between two EU ports, all of them do. A box from Shanghai to Rotterdam is therefore half covered, and a feeder leg from Rotterdam to Gdansk is fully covered.

Allowance prices moved between roughly 62 and 78 euros a tonne over the past quarter. A surcharge fixed in September on the basis of 78 will overcharge if the price falls to 62, until the carrier recalculates. Most recalculate monthly, a few quarterly.

The allocation of fuel to a box is the part I can check least. Two carriers state the method in their tariff: an average of vessel emissions on the service, divided by the boxes carried. Three give a figure and a footnote.

What a shipper can do

First, ask whether your surcharge is calculated per service or as a trade average. A per-service figure can be lower for your box if you sail on a newer ship. Second, ask when it was last reset, and what allowance price was used. Third, if you move boxes between EU ports on a feeder, check that the surcharge on the feeder leg is not applied to the whole journey. I have seen both done.

None of this is a claim that anyone is overcharging. A surcharge based on an estimate will sometimes be above and sometimes below the real cost, and the regulation does not tell carriers how to estimate. It does mean the line on your invoice is a negotiated number in a regulated costume, and a question about it is a fair one.

97: The transshipment box that counts twice

Tue, 02 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Every few months a port publishes a record throughput figure and a trade journal calls it a vote of confidence in the region. Sometimes it is. More often I want to know how much of the figure is transshipment, because a transshipped box is counted more than once, and the number then says less about local trade than it appears to.

A container arriving at a hub on a large ship, waiting two days and leaving on a smaller ship is lifted off the first vessel and onto the second. Most ports report this as two moves, or two TEU for a 40-foot box.

A worked example

Take a 40-foot box from Qingdao to Gdansk, routed via Rotterdam. At Qingdao it is loaded: one move. At Rotterdam it is discharged and later loaded onto a feeder: two moves. At Gdansk it is discharged: one move. Across the three ports that is four moves for one journey, and a statistic that counts 8 TEU for a box that is 2 TEU.¹

Now compare a box from Qingdao to Rotterdam with its own consignee. Loaded and discharged: two moves. The first box generates twice the throughput and creates no more economic activity at Rotterdam than the second.

How to read a throughput figure

I ask three questions. What share of the volume is transshipment? Has it changed? And does the port count in TEU or in boxes?

Ports with a high transshipment share, such as Algeciras or Singapore, can show large swings when one carrier moves a service between hubs, with no change in local demand. Ports with a low share, such as Felixstowe, are closer to a measure of what the hinterland consumes.

Last year one northern European hub reported growth of 4.1% in total throughput. Its own breakdown, published two pages later, showed transshipment up 9.6% and import and export combined up 1.2%. The headline was true. The second figure was the one a local haulier needed.

What changes in practice

If you plan trucking, warehouse space or chassis supply near a port, use the gateway figure and ignore the total. If you compare two ports, compare the same category in both. If a port will not split its figure, I take that as an answer.

Where the split exists, it is often a table in the annual report, six to ten pages in, headed “modal split” or “box types”.

Some ports count only the discharge, or count transshipment once. The reporting rule is usually stated in a note to the annual statistics. Where it is not stated, I assume two moves per transshipped box. ↩

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96: Four ports, one quiet week of dwell times

Tue, 25 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Dwell time is the number of days an import container sits inside a terminal between discharge and gate-out. It is published, in some form, by most large terminals, and it is almost always quoted as a median. I collected the figures for four ports in the last week of October and want to show why I think the median is the wrong place to look.

The median describes a typical box. The people who call me are not holding typical boxes.

The numbers

These are medians for import containers discharged in the week, as published by each terminal operator or port authority, rounded to one decimal:

Rotterdam, 2.1 days. The 90th percentile was 4.8 days.
Hamburg, 3.0 days. The 90th percentile was 7.2 days.
Savannah, 3.9 days. The 90th percentile was 8.5 days.
Long Beach, 5.4 days. The 90th percentile was 12.0 days.

Only Rotterdam and Hamburg publish the 90th percentile directly. For the other two I estimated it from the share of boxes still in the yard after seven days. Treat those two with caution.

Why the tail matters

The ratio between the 90th percentile and the median is 2.3 for Rotterdam, 2.4 for Hamburg, 2.2 for Savannah and 2.2 for Long Beach. So the shape is similar everywhere. The consequence is not. At Long Beach, one box in ten waited more than twelve days. Free time before storage charges is commonly five to seven days. A tenth of importers there were paying storage on a tenth of boxes, in a week with nothing unusual going on.

What drives the tail is rarely the terminal. It is a customs hold, a missing release from the carrier, a consignee without a trucking slot, or a box on a chassis that nobody has collected.

What I would ask for

If you contract with a haulier or a terminal, ask for the 90th percentile of your own boxes over the last quarter, not the published median of everyone’s. Your own figure is almost always worse than the port’s, because importers with simple cargo do not call analysts. A company I spoke to found that its own median was 4.6 days at a port that published 2.9. The difference was a recurring paperwork delay on one commodity code. It cost them about 6,000 euros a quarter in storage.

I will return to dwell in January, when the year-end peak has had time to show up in the data.

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95: The index that moved two days late

Tue, 18 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT

In the first half of October I kept a small table beside a published weekly spot index for Shanghai to Rotterdam. The index is compiled from carrier and forwarder submissions and published on Thursdays. Next to it I put the all-in price I was quoted by two forwarders on the Tuesday of the same week, for a 40-foot box, for sailing the following week.

The index moved after my quotes, every week. Not by much, but consistently.

Week	My Tuesday quote (USD/FEU)	Thursday index (USD/FEU)	Gap
29 Sep	2,310	2,285	-25
6 Oct	2,180	2,260	+80
13 Oct	2,040	2,150	+110
20 Oct	1,975	2,060	+85

My quote fell 335 dollars across the four weeks. The index fell 225. The index was above my quote in the last three weeks, and the gap was widest in the weeks when prices fell fastest.

Where the lag comes from

An index is an average of what people report, and people report what they have already booked. A forwarder who sold space on Friday at Friday’s price reports that price on Wednesday. By then the quote for next week is lower. The index therefore describes the market of about two days earlier, blended with a few quotes from the day itself.

There is a second effect. Submissions include bookings made weeks before sailing, at the price of the time. When prices are falling, older and higher bookings enter the average, and the index sits above the market. When prices are rising, the reverse happens. Neither is an error. It is what an average of past events does.

What it does to a contract review

Many index-linked contracts reset on the published number. If you review such a contract in a falling market, the reset will overstate what you could buy the same week. Over four weeks in my table, a shipper on a monthly reset paid about 85 dollars per box more than the Tuesday spot, on a lane where that shipper moves 120 boxes a month. That is just over 10,000 dollars.

If you can choose, ask for a reset on the average of the last two published values, or on a date nearer the sailing. In a rising market that works against you, so ask in the weeks when prices are falling. The sellers of the index would agree that it measures the recent past. The question is whether your contract should be priced on it.

94: Blank sailings are announced in order

Tue, 11 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT

A blank sailing is announced, in my experience, in a fairly regular order, and the order says more than the count does. Over the last ten weeks I logged 63 cancelled departures on Asia to North Europe services. For each one I recorded when it first appeared, in which document, and who put it there.

The usual order

The earliest sign is a quiet change in the schedule file: a departure date vanishes, or a vessel name is replaced by “TBN”, to be nominated. This happened a median of 19 days before the planned sailing. Only 9 of the 63 were mentioned in any public statement at that point.

The second sign is a customer advisory sent to booked shippers, often under the phrase “network adjustment”. The median gap between the schedule change and the advisory was 7 days, which leaves roughly 12 days before sailing. The third is a note on the rate sheet, usually a week later still, when the carrier starts quoting the next departure at a higher level.

So a shipper who reads advisories learns about a blank twelve days out. A shipper who reads the schedule file learns about it nineteen days out. That is a week of extra time to rebook, which on a busy lane is the difference between a slot and a rollover.

Who goes first

Alliance members behave differently from carriers running alone. Where two members share a service, the partner’s matching sailing was cancelled within 3 days in 27 of the 31 pairs I could match. A vessel-sharing agreement leaves little room for one party to blank and the other to sail. A large Asian carrier operating a standalone service announced a median of 5 days later than the alliance pairs, perhaps because it needs no one’s agreement.

What I do with it

I count the TBN entries on each trade lane every Monday. The rule I use is crude: four or more new TBN entries on one lane in one week. It preceded a rise in the spot index within three weeks in 5 of the 7 times it occurred. Seven is a small sample, and I would not stake a contract on it. I would use it to decide whether to book early.

Continue reading: 320 more words for members

93: Why I read schedules before press releases

Tue, 04 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Welcome to the first issue of Harbor Notes. I am Ines Varga, and for nine years I have read container schedules, tariffs and rate indices for a living, first at a forwarder in Rotterdam and then on my own. This newsletter is what I would have wanted on my desk back then: one issue a week, with one question and the working shown.

The question for this week is why I start with schedules. A press release tells you what a carrier wants you to believe about its network. A schedule tells you what it has committed to sail. When the two disagree, I trust the schedule, because changing it costs money and changing a sentence does not.

What a schedule contains

Each weekly service publishes a rotation, a vessel, and an estimated arrival and departure at every port. That is roughly 14 to 20 dated promises per sailing. Across the 40 or so services I follow on Asia to Europe and transpacific lanes, that comes to about 700 promises a week. I load them into a spreadsheet on Monday morning and compare them with the previous Monday’s version.

Two things show up quickly. One is a vessel swapped for a smaller one. The other is a port call dropped from the rotation. Neither appears in a press release, and each is visible two to three weeks before it reaches a freight rate.

What to expect here

Each Tuesday I will take one thing from the data and follow it. Some issues are free and some are for members, with the cut marked clearly. I will say when a figure is rough, and I will say when I am guessing. I will not name carriers when I am describing an error or a pattern, because the pattern is the point and a single bad week proves little.

A few terms will come up often. TEU is a twenty-foot container, the unit that capacity is counted in. A blank sailing is a scheduled departure that a carrier cancels. A rotation is the ordered list of ports a service calls at.

One thing to try

Pick one lane you ship on. Save its published schedule today, and save it again next Tuesday. Put the two side by side and look for anything that moved by more than a day. Most weeks nothing will. In about one week in five, something will, and you will know before your forwarder does.

Next Tuesday: how blank sailings are announced, and why the order of the announcements matters more than the number.

Harbor Notes

112: Why a box from Busan to Rotterdam cost $3,140 this week

Who blinked

Why contract rates did not move

What the $3,140 contains

What I would do this week

111: The Suez detour is now the base case

What changed in the data

The arithmetic of staying

The shipper’s problem

Where I could be wrong

110: Reading a carrier's Q3 call in eleven minutes

What I would do with it

109: The oldest ship on the loop

The tail

What the shipper sees

A simple habit

Footnotes

108: The berth window that was not

How it got there

The bill

A short field guide to tariff errors

Why this is not just trivia

107: Four reader questions about contract renewals

Should I renew now or wait for the October spot dip?

Can I split my volume between two carriers?

What happens if I miss my minimum quantity commitment?

Is an index-linked contract worth the hassle?

106: A council says the quiet part

What the numbers can and cannot say

The sentence I would keep

105: The long life of a single quote

Stage one: the quote

Stage two: the booking

Stage three: the first rollover

Stage four: the ship

Stage five: the forwarder recovers

Stage six: the terminal

Stage seven: the invoice

What the customer could have done

The version without a villain

Three questions to put in an email

What I take from it

104: A short note on a misprinted schedule

103: What the bunker surcharge hides

The three places where the margin lives

What the Antwerp question looks like in numbers

A way to check your own carrier

Why it matters more now

102: Rates by lane, with the asterisks left in

Why Ho Chi Minh City moved most

Why Los Angeles fell

The asterisks

One habit worth borrowing

101: Five things in the schedule data this week

100: How an issue is put together

The argument comes first

Sources, in order of trust

Tables are the charts

What readers send

What members get after the rule

Footnotes

99: Seven issues in, what the data has said

What worked

What I got wrong

What comes next

98: A carbon line that arrives on the invoice

Why the range is so wide

What a shipper can do

97: The transshipment box that counts twice

A worked example

How to read a throughput figure

What changes in practice

Footnotes

96: Four ports, one quiet week of dwell times

The numbers

Why the tail matters

What I would ask for

95: The index that moved two days late

Where the lag comes from