By Chandranath Chakraborty, Founder & Managing Partner · [email protected]
As spot rates defy the forecasts, the exposure in a 2026 transport budget sits in the contract's surcharge mechanics rather than the rate line.
Drewry's assessment of 6 August put the World Container Index at $4,297 per 40ft container, a rise of one per cent that interrupted three consecutive weeks of decline. The composite understates the movement on the routes that matter most to importers into North America: Shanghai to New York rose four per cent to $7,893 per 40ft and Shanghai to Los Angeles three per cent to $5,894 as carriers implemented August general rate increases against firm volumes. Drewry also recorded congestion across central and southern China continuing to constrain usable capacity, and eight blank sailings scheduled for the following week, unchanged on the week before, which points to carriers managing supply rather than chasing share.
The Asia picture is the same story closer to home. The Shanghai Containerized Freight Index averaged 3,018 points in June 2026, with the month's high near 3,240, and the region's exporters price against it weekly.
The carrier reporting season has said the same thing in a different register. Maersk raised full-year underlying EBITDA guidance to a range of $8bn to $10bn from $4.5bn to $7bn, lifted underlying EBIT to $2bn to $4bn from a range that ran from a $1.5bn loss to a $1bn profit, and improved its free cash flow expectation to an outflow of at least $1.5bn from at least $3bn, with global container market growth now put at about four per cent against a previous two to four per cent; the full interim results are due on 13 August. Hapag-Lloyd moved its own full-year EBITDA range to $2.7bn to $3.7bn from $1.1bn to $3.1bn. The midpoint of Maersk's guided EBITDA range shifted by roughly $3.2bn in a single revision, and a shift of that order does not come from cost control.
Set against that, the forecasting position at the start of the year is worth recalling, because a great many transport budgets were built on it. Xeneta expected global average spot rates to fall by up to 25 per cent over full-year 2026, a thousand dollars off a $4,000 container. Long-term contract rates were to fall by up to 10 per cent. Xeneta also published a specific view that the US–China trade truce would not be enough to revive a weakening container market. The reasoning was sound on the supply side. What intervened was routing: disruption around the Strait of Hormuz through the first half pushed services onto longer rotations, absorbed vessel capacity that the orderbook had been expected to release, and left carriers with the ability to make rate increases stick. Shippers who set a 2026 plan on a falling curve are now carrying a variance that was never approved and, in most organisations, has not yet been quantified.
MomentumX works from that fact base through contract diagnosis, surcharge negotiation, implementation and value delivery.
For the worked model behind this analysis, or to discuss the category: [email protected]
The public record describes a rate. It does not describe how a rate becomes an invoice, and that is where the money has moved. In two decades on the buy side across Disney, Nike, Unilever and Procter & Gamble we watched this sequence run through several cycles and it rarely varied. The tender itself was competent: a wide field, a disciplined evaluation, a defensible award. The contract that followed carried the commercial terms of the previous contract with new rates dropped into it. When the market tightened, delivered cost per container separated from the rate table inside a quarter, and the team found itself arguing about clauses it had neither drafted nor evidenced.
Three provisions do most of that work, and a tender examines none of them. General rate increase mechanics are usually governed by the carrier's own notice period rather than by an agreed trigger, so an increase can be applied without any contractual test of market conditions. Surcharge headings for bunker adjustment, congestion, peak season, war risk and equipment imbalance sit outside the rate table, and are commonly written with no cap, no expiry and no stated method of calculation. Where a contract is described as index-linked, the index is frequently named without a settlement source, a publication date or a reference window, which leaves the adjustment to be agreed after the event by whoever issues the invoice.
Ownership compounds all three. Freight is one of the few categories of its size that commonly sits with supply chain rather than procurement, and the split falls in the wrong place. The operational team owns carrier performance and service design, finance owns the accrual, and the commercial architecture between them is owned by nobody. The base rate is benchmarked, sometimes rigorously. The surcharge stack is not benchmarked at all, because no function has been asked to.
The portfolio work gives a sense of how widely this sits. Across the 729 companies held by 47 Asian private-equity firms that we mapped this year, only 35 are logistics or shipping businesses. Almost every one of the remaining 694 buys freight, and in the consumer, packaged food, retail and industrial holdings it lands close enough to gross margin to move an earnings figure. Freight is therefore among the few categories where a single contractual fix repeats across most of a book, and among the few nobody owns centrally.
What the index monitor adds is the timing. Drewry publishes weekly, so a shipper can see the rate turn against its budget within days. The surcharge stack has no equivalent series and never will, because it is contractual rather than traded. It is visible only in a company's own invoices, and it goes unmeasured in organisations that watch the published index diligently every week.
The arithmetic is worth doing in the open, because it is the part that appears in no market report. Take a shipper moving 2,000 forty-foot equivalent units a year on the transpacific — an illustrative volume, chosen to make the mechanics visible rather than drawn from any client file. At Drewry's 6 August assessment of $5,894 on Shanghai to Los Angeles, the rate line alone is about $11.8m. A 2026 budget built on Xeneta's expectation of spot falling by up to a quarter would have planned that lane materially below where it now sits, and the variance is real money that nobody has yet been asked to approve.
The larger number sits underneath it. Delivered cost per container is the rate plus everything the contract permits to be added to it, and only the first of those carries a ceiling. Subtract the rate table from twelve months of paid invoices and what remains is the surcharge stack. On the files we have examined that share has been consistently larger than the shipper expected, and it had never been separately measured, so there was no baseline against which any increase could be challenged.
Measuring it is only half the exercise, because a number the carrier can dispute is not worth having. Each figure in a freight case is traced to a published reference through the MomentumX Benchmark Basis™, in this category Drewry's World Container Index, Xeneta's assessments and the carriers' own disclosure, so a claim about market level can be checked line by line by the counterparty. A benchmark the supplier can verify is worth more in a negotiation than one that flatters the buyer.
The value is then separated so it can be claimed once. The Four-Lever Framework™ splits freight across price, specification, demand and cadence, additive between levers and never within one. Price is the rate table and the surcharge architecture. Specification is service level, transit commitment and mode — what is genuinely time-critical, and what has been shipped at premium service out of habit. Demand is volume consolidation and lane rationalisation. Cadence is order and shipment frequency, which is usually where the least-examined money sits, because it is set by planning convention rather than by cost. Keeping them apart prevents the common error of booking a consolidation benefit twice, once as volume and once as rate.
The worked file behind this piece is available on request: [email protected].
A shipper carrying a 2026 freight variance should not re-tender. It should reopen the contract. A tender resets the rate table, which is the part that was already competitive, and leaves untouched the three provisions through which the cost actually entered — the increase trigger, the surcharge headings, the index definition. Reopening those is unglamorous, takes weeks rather than months, and does not require the incumbent to be replaced, which is part of why it is rarely the option a steering committee reaches for.
The strongest argument against this is the one a carrier-side negotiator would make immediately: in a tightening market a shipper has no standing to reopen anything, and attempting it invites a worse allocation when space is short. That objection is fair where a shipper is small on the lane or has no alternative service. It holds less well in two respects. These provisions come up for renegotiation at renewal in any case, so the question is only whether the shipper arrives prepared. And a shipper that has measured its own surcharge stack arrives with a number rather than a complaint, which is a different kind of standing from the commercial sort.
MomentumX can take the work through the full cycle. It starts with the contract file and the delivered-cost-per-container build. It ends with reopened terms and the recovery verified in the accounts.
For enterprises, the immediate exposure is the gap between a transport budget built on a falling curve and a market that has moved the other way, and the practical remedy is a contract-level review of how increases and surcharges are permitted to enter the delivered cost, which a re-tender does not reach.
For consulting firms, freight is a category where a client engagement often needs a should-cost view and a benchmark position faster than a general practice can assemble one; MomentumX works as a specialist procurement delivery partner behind those engagements, bringing the category engines and the senior judgement while the client relationship stays with the firm.
For private-equity sponsors, freight sits close to gross margin in consumer, industrial and distribution assets, and a portfolio-wide view of contract architecture usually finds the same three clauses missing in every company.
The management challenge is constant. What does a container actually cost delivered, and which line of the contract moved it?
For the worked model behind this article, a Confidential Spend Review of a specific category or contract, or a discussion on an APAC cost programme: [email protected]
MomentumX works from opportunity identification through commercial strategy, negotiation, implementation and value delivery.
A Confidential Spend Review — a senior look at a single category or contract, on client data under a non-disclosure agreement or on an illustrative basis.
Or the Spend Exposure Index, a confidential self-assessment completed privately, with no data shared.
Written by Chandranath Chakraborty, Founder & Managing Partner, MomentumX Consulting. Two decades running procurement for The Walt Disney Company, Nike, Unilever and Procter & Gamble, with structural cost reductions above 12 per cent across a US$1B+ regional spend base in his most recent role. LinkedIn · [email protected]