Excerpts from the Journal of Commerce:
One major global shipper compared the container shipping freight market to a car dealership. “The basic product is not profitable, but if you can sign the customer up for a sufficient number of additionals, you’ll survive,” he told JOC.com.
[S]urcharges contained, among other items, terminal handling fees at both the port of loading and the port of destination, bunker adjustment factors, low sulfur fuel surcharges, security surcharge, security manifest and many more. Once the surcharges were added up, they totalled $828.15 per TEU, more than the current spot market rate.
This has led to a suspicion from some shippers that the surcharges are deployed for profit-making purposes rather than to recover costs of calling at ports.