The news: Samsung is asking the Federal Maritime Commission to order CMA CGM to refund $186 million in demurrage, detention and rail storage charges. It is the biggest of the seven complaints Samsung has filed against ocean carriers since 2022.
The charges were on cargo CMA CGM was paid to move. Starting in January 2020, Samsung bought store-door service, where one contract covers the ocean voyage and the inland move, and the carrier arranges the rail, the trucking and the chassis. The complaint says CMA CGM stayed in charge of the inland move but billed Samsung for the delays, more than 121,000 separate charges in all.
At one rail ramp, CMA CGM told Samsung to pay the railroad’s storage bill itself and “invoice back CMA,” while agreeing the storage was the carrier’s own. At the port of New York and New Jersey, it held 40 containers over a $590,000 charge raised by its Mexico affiliate.
Samsung has won only a fraction of what it asked for in earlier cases. The two complaints decided so far, against ZIM and SM Line, recovered $5.59 million of roughly $29.3 million claimed.
The details: Under store door, the carrier is the railroad’s customer, not Samsung. At wheeled rail ramps, where containers come off the train onto chassis, the carrier has to provide a chassis for each box before a trucker can take it. When CMA CGM’s chassis did not show up, Samsung’s containers sat stacked on the ground, and the railroad started charging storage on the second day.
Containers that arrived at Jacksonville in September 2021 waited 17 days for a chassis. Samsung puts one set of those charges at $3.7 million. The company says it had no account with the railroad, no portal login and no statement, so it could not see what it was being asked to pay, or dispute it.
The complaint describes four other problems:
CMA CGM reclassified boxes that were already accruing demurrage as merchant haulage, meaning the shipper was now responsible for the inland move. It allegedly did so without telling Samsung. That left Samsung with rail storage bills it had not contracted for.
Truckers hired by CMA CGM did not have enough chassis. Eight containers bound for a San Antonio distribution center sat at Houston waiting for them.
Terminals in New York and New Jersey refused CMA CGM empties in mid-2022. Samsung found a yard that would take them. CMA CGM would not approve it, then said it had no control over terminals.
Past-due notices gave Samsung two to five days to pay or have its cargo held, and CMA CGM did hold cargo.
Samsung also says invoices arrived with no reason stated, charges it had already paid were billed again, and some charges came from failures in the carrier’s own dispatch software.
What changed: Samsung stopped buying store door in August 2022, according to the Commission’s order in the SM Line case. It switched to port-to-port terms, where the carrier’s responsibility ends at the port terminal and the shipper arranges its own trucking and rail.
Samsung hired more staff and leased off-dock yard space to handle that work, and it puts the cost at $8.1 million in the complaint. The switch came four years before it sued CMA CGM.
The pattern: Samsung has filed cases against seven ocean carriers in 46 months: ZIM, SM Line, COSCO, OOCL, HMM, Wan Hai and CMA CGM, all through the same law firm. Agreements with the carriers paused the three-year filing deadline, which kept the 2020 charges in play.
Against ZIM, Samsung claimed about $12.2 million and was awarded $3,680,339. The award covered only demurrage from four periods when ZIM was holding Samsung’s cargo and Samsung could not pick it up. The rest was denied because Samsung could not show what caused each delay. “Without knowing the cause of the delays, it is not possible to apportion the damages,” the judge wrote.
Against SM Line, Samsung claimed about $17.1 million and was awarded $1.9 million for 115 charges. Those charges survived because SM Line’s own internal spreadsheet, turned over by mistake during the case, listed them as carrier-caused. Samsung’s expert said he had not analyzed the charges container by container. “The burden to prove that a particular charge unlawfully caused SEA harm is with SEA, not SM Line,” the Commission wrote.
The two awards came out at different fractions of the claim. ZIM was ordered to pay about 30 cents of every dollar Samsung sought, and SM Line about 11 cents.
In both cases, Samsung recovered money only where it could show what caused the delay on a specific container, and most of that proof came from the carrier’s own records.
The counter: No ruling has yet held that charging demurrage or detention on store-door cargo is unreasonable. The chief administrative law judge found in the ZIM case that Samsung had not established it was, and the Commission is still reviewing that decision.
Carrier tariffs put the risk on the shipper whether or not the carrier arranges the inland move. Hapag-Lloyd’s US rules assign demurrage caused by trucking and chassis shortages, volume surges, terminal congestion and subcontractor failure to the shipper. ONE’s US policy says its inbound demurrage policy “applies equally to merchant and carrier haulage.”
Carriers dispute the facts too. COSCO’s answer in its own case says the charges came about because the truckers Samsung chose failed to pick up cargo on time, and that most of the money was charged by third parties. HMM says Samsung demanded a $46 million refund covering all of its store-door charges since 2020 without first contesting the individual charges through the dispute process on HMM’s website.
The judge in the ZIM case described the problem this way: avoiding delay charges “is like the dreaded group project,” because some delays are not the fault of either party.
The new complaint process the Commission opened this week does not apply to most of these charges. It puts the burden on the carrier to prove a charge was reasonable, but only for charges from June 2022 onward. Nearly everything Samsung is disputing came before that.
What’s next: An initial decision in the CMA CGM case is due September 1, 2027. Before that, the Commission’s final decision in the ZIM case, the first of the seven, is due October 20, 2026.
