TL;DR:CMA CGM and Ocean Network Express are reportedly in talks to mergetheir standalone India-US East Coast services into a vessel-sharingagreement, though neither carrier has confirmed it. The real story isthe capacity math: CMA CGM is three ships short of what weekly Capeof Good Hope service requires, and ONE has been discounting faresjust to fill its sailings. Indian export volumes jumped almost 40% ina single month and spot rates hit a 20-month high, which meansshippers on this lane are facing a squeeze a vessel-sharing deal mayease, but won't necessarily fix.
According to Journal of Commerce sources, CMA CGM and OceanNetwork Express have held multiple rounds of talks about combiningtheir independent India-US East Coast services into a vessel-sharingagreement. The services in question are CMA CGM's Indamex and ONE'sWIN. Neither carrier responded to requests for comment in India, andno agreement has been filed or announced anywhere.
Treat this as exactly what it is: an early-stage discussionsurfaced through trade sources, not a signed deal. That distinctionmatters, because how this gets read will shape booking decisions longbefore any agreement reaches a regulator's desk.
Look past the word "talks" and the operational pictureexplains why two competing carriers would even consider poolingvessels. CMA CGM has 10 ships deployed on the Indamex. A consistentweekly rotation via the Cape of Good Hope needs 13. ONE's WIN hasfared worse: it manages roughly two sailings a month out of India,lifts 3,500 to 4,000 TEUs per departure, and has had to undercutmarket rates just to fill its westbound allocations. ONE recentlydropped Hazira from its port rotation entirely, leaving Nhava Sheva,Mundra, and Colombo as its remaining India calls before the Atlanticcrossing.
A vessel-sharing agreement between two under-tonnaged servicespools what already exists. It doesn't add a single ship to the laneon its own. If combined deployment after a VSA still falls short ofwhat reliable weekly service for a merged network actually needs, theblank sailings don't disappear. They just get distributeddifferently.
This capacity gap would be manageable on its own. It's collidinghead-on with demand. Indian exports to the US East Coast hit 83,470TEUs in May, up almost 40% from April and the highest monthly figuresince last September. Spot rates followed: $3,375 per FEU as of June18, a 25% jump in a single week and the highest level in 20 months.
Separately reported industry context adds a compounding factor: abacklog of roughly 40,000 containers at JNPT tied to a drivershortage, which has slowed container evacuation and effectivelyreduced usable vessel loading capacity even further (per MaritimeGateway reporting).
For shippers without locked-in space, rising volume and tighteningcapacity are now pushing rates higher at the same time. That's aboutas unfavorable as this lane gets right now.
Here's what most coverage of these VSA talks won't tell you: the13-ship requirement driving this conversation exists only because theIndamex is routing via the Cape of Good Hope. That's not a fixed factabout the lane. It's a consequence of an active, unresolved securitysituation in the Middle East that has already reversed course morethan once this year.
The Indamex actually tested a return to the Suez Canal in January,a move that cut round-trip transit by roughly two weeks and freed uptwo ships for redeployment elsewhere. That changed in early March,when the conflict between the US, Israel, and Iran escalated and CMACGM, like the rest of the industry, rerouted back around Africa.
A US-Iran memorandum aimed at ending that conflict was signed inmid-June. As of this week, the two sides are still describing thesituation it's meant to resolve in contradictory terms, with theStrait of Hormuz reportedly declared closed and reopened within thesame 48 hours more than once. We're not predicting how that resolves.What we'd flag is this: whatever capacity assumptions a CMA CGM-ONEagreement gets built on this month could shift again before the inkdries, in either direction. A genuine, sustained reopening of the RedSea route would hand both carriers back ships faster than anyvessel-sharing agreement would.
This isn't an isolated story. Niche and regional services launchedor expanded during the Red Sea diversion years are increasinglyproving hard to sustain alone, and pooling vessels with a competitoris becoming a more common response than adding tonnage outright,particularly in a global fleet environment that's still oversupplied.India's trade lane to the US East Coast sits inside a bigger trend:demand from Indian exporters is scaling faster than the dedicatedvessel infrastructure connecting them directly to US ports.
For shippers, that gap is worth tracking regardless of whetherthis particular VSA gets signed.
Worldtop & Meta is tracking the Indamex and WIN schedulesdirectly, alongside spot rate movement on this lane, so our clientsaren't caught flat-footed by the next blank sailing or rate jump. IfIndia-USEC is part of your network, we're glad to walk through whatyour specific exposure looks like right now.
Source:https://www.joc.com/article/cma-cgm-one-in-india-usec-vsa-talks-amid-standalone-operational-woes-sources-6240412
