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.

Continue reading: 634 more words for members

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.

Continue reading: 345 more words for members

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. 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.

Continue reading: 614 more words for members

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.

Continue reading: 543 more words for members

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.

Continue reading: 2155 more words for members

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.

Continue reading: 575 more words for members

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.

Continue reading: 558 more words for members

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.

Issue 104 is the time it was. ↩

Continue reading: 86 more words for members

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.

Continue reading: 323 more words for members

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.

Continue reading: 331 more words for members

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.

Continue reading: 324 more words for members

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.

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.