Samsung's $186m claim against CMA CGM rests on 121,000 charge lines

The announcement

Samsung Electronics America filed a complaint at the Federal Maritime Commission against CMA CGM S.A., docket 26-12, served on 1 September 2026. It seeks at least $186 million: $148 million in demurrage, detention and rail storage charges assessed between roughly mid-2020 and 2023, $8.1 million in costs Samsung says it incurred arranging inland moves CMA CGM had contracted to perform, and about $30 million in prejudgment interest. The pleading cites 46 U.S.C. 41102(c) and counts more than 26,000 demurrage charges and more than 94,000 detention-type charges, over 121,000 line items in total. Samsung sent a formal demand in July 2024 and met CMA CGM in 2025 and 2026 without settling. An initial decision is due by 1 September 2027, a final Commission decision by 15 March 2028.

What it means

Start with the $162,799 box. Busan to The Colony, Texas via Long Beach, 2021, and the charge is rail storage. No argument about free-time day counts gets you to that figure. A unit sat on a ramp for months with the meter running and nobody on either side stopped it. Every carrier and every large importer had these units in 2021. The relevant question for anyone reading this is whether your team looks at the tail of the charge distribution or only the average. A $600 demurrage line is noise. A five-figure line on a single container is a process failure that has already happened and is still accruing.

The core operational allegation is haulage conversion. Samsung says store-door bookings were switched to merchant haulage or CY without its agreement, which pushed the inland leg, the chassis, the drayman and the resulting clock onto Samsung. On store door the carrier owns the inland move and its own detention exposure. Flip the haulage code and the exposure moves across the table, along with the invoice.

I want to be fair about the 2021 context. Converting store door to CY when there is no chassis, no driver and a closed ramp was often the only way to keep cargo moving, and CMA CGM's stated reasons at the time were chassis and trucker shortages and terminal congestion. Those were real. The problem is not the decision, it is the paperwork around it. If your booking system lets an operator change haulage mode without a countersigned amendment, without the rating engine repricing the move, and without a flag on downstream D&D accrual, you have wired this exposure into your process. That is a systems finding, and it applies to carriers and forwarders equally. Most liner booking platforms, including the systems in use at the time, treated haulage mode as an editable operational attribute rather than a locked contractual term requiring documented shipper consent or a formal approval workflow before a store-door-to-CY change.

The allegation with the sharpest operational teeth is the finance hold. Samsung says CMA CGM suspended accounts and withheld release of containers unconnected to the disputed invoices to force payment, including roughly 40 boxes held at a New York-New Jersey terminal in April 2022 over about $590,000. That turns a billing argument into a cargo availability event. 41102(c) reaches practices relating to receiving, handling, storing and delivering property, and a hold placed on a container that carries no charge of its own sits directly in that language. If your credit control function can place a release hold at the account level rather than the invoice level, an accounts receivable decision is now a berth-to-door service decision, and nobody in operations reviewed it.

The part nobody in the trade coverage has said out loud: Samsung reconstructed 121,000 charge lines across three years and tied each one to a booking, a haulage mode, a facility and a date. That is the whole case. Reparations at the FMC are proved line by line. Most importers cannot do this because pandemic-era invoices were approved under duress, coded to a freight accrual and never reconciled against the booking record. If you want the transferable lesson from this filing, it is that the invoice archive is the evidence, and the time to build it is before you need it.

Two sober qualifiers. First, the conduct predates the FMC's May 2024 billing rule, so it will be judged on 41102(c) reasonableness and the 2020 interpretive rule, not the 30-day invoicing window. Section 541.4, which named who could be invoiced, was vacated by the D.C. Circuit in WSC v. FMC on 23 September 2025, so the current rulebook is not the yardstick here. Second, filed is not awarded. OJ Commerce v. Hamburg Süd ran while I was inside that organisation, and the OOCL decision in 2025 produced $45.6 million against a $165 million claim, with the judge rejecting most of the demurrage and detention categories. The D&D portion is historically the hardest to sustain.

What would have to be true

For an award anywhere near $186 million, Samsung has to show consent was absent on the haulage conversions, which means contemporaneous booking amendments or their absence, not after-the-fact correspondence. It has to show the specific units were not available for pickup, which means terminal appointment records and ramp availability logs for the exact dates billed. It has to link each held container to a disputed invoice it had no charge against. And it has to survive the argument that congestion in 2021 made timely delivery impossible regardless of intent, which is the defence that has trimmed every prior claim of this type. The complaint treats the relationship as direct between Samsung (as consignee) and CMA CGM under through bills of lading for the store-door moves, with no indication that the relevant volume was routed through an NVO.

What I would watch

CMA CGM's answer, due 25 days from service, and specifically whether it pleads the haulage conversions as agreed or as unilateral operational necessity. Watch for a motion to dismiss on the three-year limitation period, since charges from 2020 and early 2021 sit outside it. Watch whether other large electronics and retail importers file in the following two quarters, because that tells you the reconstruction work is being done at scale and this is a category rather than one shipper. And watch your own side: if your carrier or your BCO customer cannot produce a haulage-mode audit trail per booking, this filing is a description of your exposure, not somebody else's.

Sources: Federal Register, 4 Sep 2026