CMA CGM Ship Tracking: Find Any Vessel Live
In this article 8 sections
CMA CGM ship tracking and CMA CGM container tracking get typed into the same search bar, but they answer different questions. One tells you what happened to a booking. The other tells you where a 400-metre hull actually is right now, and the second one runs entirely on AIS, the same system that shows any ship at sea, not something CMA CGM operates or controls. If what you want is the ship itself, moving, on a map, this is the shorter and more useful path, and it starts with forgetting your booking number entirely.
Shipment Tracking and Ship Tracking Are Two Different Systems
CMA CGM’s own portal is excellent at one thing: telling you the custody status of a specific box. Paste in a container, booking or bill of lading number and it returns an event history, gate in, loaded on board, discharge, each one timestamped. What it does not do, and was never built to do, is show you a moving ship. Our CMA CGM container tracking guide goes through that workflow in full if a shipment reference is what you’re holding. Ship tracking works from the opposite direction. Instead of a reference number tied to cargo, it reads a radio broadcast tied to the hull.
No account, no booking, no customer number required. Anyone who has the ship’s name can pull up where it is, which is a different kind of access than a shipment portal gives you.
That’s why the two searches keep colliding in the same results page without actually competing for the same answer.
What AIS Actually Tells You About a CMA CGM Ship
Every commercial ship above a certain size carries an AIS transponder, required by law, broadcasting over VHF whether or not anyone’s watching. Coastal stations catch it near land, satellites catch it everywhere else. The message is narrow: position, speed, course, heading, destination, ETA, draught, a status flag, and the ship’s name, MMSI and IMO numbers. No cargo manifest, no operator name, no fleet affiliation — a ship shows up as a ship, full stop.
The navigational status field is worth watching, because crews set it manually and rarely update it. A ship can broadcast “under way using engine” for a week straight, whether it’s doing 19 knots or holding two knots in a queue. Position and speed are trustworthy in real time; the status flag is closer to a default someone forgot to change.
How to Track Any CMA CGM Ship in Real Time
This takes under a minute once you have a name. Most of the time spent on this search goes into finding that name in the first place.
Step 1: Get a name or an IMO number
A CMA CGM reference page, a port call schedule, a news article about a specific sailing, or simply knowing the ship by reputation all work. The IMO number is worth copying down if it’s shown anywhere, because fleet names get reused across sister ships while an IMO number stays with one hull for its entire working life.
Step 2: Open MarineRadar’s live map
MarineRadar tracks vessels worldwide from AIS data gathered by both terrestrial receivers and satellites, which is how a ship stays visible once it’s a few hundred miles offshore and out of coastal VHF range.
Step 3: Search the name directly
Type the vessel name, or the IMO or MMSI number, into the search bar. There’s no CMA CGM filter to apply first and none to remove afterward. You’re searching for one ship the same way you’d search for any ship from any line.
Step 4: Read the full profile, not just the pin
The position dot is the least interesting part of the page. Speed, course, destination, ETA and draught sit alongside it, and route history shows the track the ship has actually sailed, which is how you tell a vessel holding 18 knots on a straight line from one circling slowly off a congested anchorage while its ETA field quietly keeps advertising the same date.
Step 5: Decide whether to watch or get told
Refreshing a map tab every hour works, but it’s not the only option. Drawing a zone around a port of interest and getting notified the moment a ship enters it does the same job without the babysitting.
There Is No "Show Me Every CMA CGM Ship" Button
This is the honest limit, and it’s worth stating plainly rather than letting someone discover it mid-search. AIS carries no operator field, so no live map, MarineRadar included, can filter a fleet by company name the way an airline’s app filters by flight number. You cannot type “CMA CGM” into the search bar and get a list of every one of their roughly 625 ships currently at sea. What you can do instead is work from what you already know: if you have one ship’s name, you have a search, and if you don’t, the next two sections give you a shortcut into one anyway.
Where CMA CGM's Ships Actually Concentrate
CMA CGM is headquartered in Marseille, and Marseille-Fos remains one of its heaviest-called French ports alongside Le Havre, which anchors the line’s northern European routes. Neither is where most of the fleet spends its time, though. The bulk of CMA CGM’s capacity rides the big east-west trades: Asia to northern Europe through Suez, Asia to the US across the Pacific, and Middle East Gulf routes feeding into Jebel Ali, one of the busiest transhipment hubs on the Ocean Alliance network. None of that needs a dedicated CMA CGM mode.
Open the live map over the Singapore Strait, the approaches to Rotterdam, or a busy stretch at Jebel Ali, and container ships cluster thickly enough that a few taps turn up a CMA CGM hull without starting from a name at all. It’s slower than a direct search, but it works precisely because the line’s own scale makes its ships hard to avoid in those corridors.
The CMA CGM Fleet in Numbers
CMA CGM’s container fleet reached roughly 4.39 million TEU of capacity by mid-2026, and the line was the fastest-growing of the top ten container lines in the first half of the year, adding 235,500 TEU, about 5.7 percent, through twelve new deliveries. That intake mixed LNG dual-fuel ships with methanol-powered vessels, which tells you something about where the line is placing its bets on propulsion.
| Class | Flagship | Capacity | Fuel | Delivered |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jacques Saadé class | CMA CGM Jacques Saadé (IMO 9839179) | 23,000 TEU | LNG dual-fuel | 2020, nine-ship class |
| Notre Dame class | CMA CGM Notre Dame | 24,212 TEU | LNG dual-fuel | May 2026, first of ten |
Both classes run on liquefied natural gas rather than conventional bunker fuel, which CMA CGM credits with roughly a 20 percent cut in CO2 emissions alongside sharp reductions in sulphur and particulate output. Neither number changes how you track the ships. They’re still AIS-equipped hulls, searchable the same way as any vessel in MarineRadar’s list of frequently tracked container ships, where Jacques Saadé already appears.
Why a CMA CGM Box Might Be Riding Someone Else's Ship
CMA CGM runs most of its deep-sea network through the Ocean Alliance, a vessel-sharing partnership with COSCO, Evergreen and OOCL that was recently extended through 2032. The four lines pool ships and slots across dozens of shared services rather than sailing separate strings, and roughly a third of the pooled fleet is actually operated by CMA CGM itself. The rest carries COSCO, Evergreen or OOCL funnels while still moving CMA CGM cargo. If you’re looking for a specific CMA CGM shipment rather than tracking the brand’s own ships for their own sake, the vessel named on your booking page might fly a different line’s colours entirely, and that’s the alliance working as designed rather than a mix-up.
Readers coming at this from a COSCO booking can start from our COSCO container tracking guide instead, which walks the same handoff from the other side.
Watching More Than One CMA CGM Ship at Once
A single search works fine for one ship. It gets tedious fast once you’re interested in three or four at a time. Our guide on tracking multiple container ships at once covers grouping several vessels and comparing their speed, course and ETA side by side, which is a different approach than repeating the same search bar entry over and over.
A busy port approach or a chokepoint like the Singapore Strait does something similar without any setup. CMA CGM’s hulls turn up there often, simply given the scale of its Asia-Europe and trans-Pacific services.
Conclusion
CMA CGM ship tracking and CMA CGM container tracking will keep landing in the same search results, but they’re not the same lookup. One needs a reference number and a booking portal. The other needs a name, an IMO number, and a live AIS map, and it works on any ship in the fleet regardless of whether you have a booking tied to it.
There’s no fleet filter to speed that up. A name is still the fastest way in.
MarineRadar is free to start on Android and iPhone. Search a CMA CGM ship by name and you’ll see it moving within seconds.
FAQs
How can I track a CMA CGM shipment?
That’s container tracking, not ship tracking, and it runs through a different page entirely. Enter your container, booking or bill of lading number on CMA CGM’s own tracking portal, or see our CMA CGM container tracking guide for the full workflow including how to get from that reference to the ship’s live position.
How can I track a ship's live location?
Search its name, IMO number or MMSI number on a live AIS map such as MarineRadar. The result shows position, speed, course, destination and ETA, updated as new AIS messages arrive from coastal receivers or satellites, with no account or reference number required to look it up.
How can I track container ships?
By name or IMO number, the same as any ship. Cargo type isn’t part of the AIS broadcast either way.
How many ships does CMA CGM operate?
Around 625 across its full fleet as of 2026, representing roughly 4.39 million TEU of capacity. That figure moves constantly: twelve new ships joined in the first half of 2026 alone, a mix of LNG dual-fuel and methanol-powered hulls, while older tonnage gets sold, chartered out or scrapped on an entirely separate schedule. Whatever total you find quoted somewhere is already a little out of date by the time you read it, which is true of every major container line’s fleet count, not just this one.
What's the biggest CMA CGM ship currently sailing?
CMA CGM Notre Dame, delivered in May 2026 at 24,212 TEU, is the largest currently in service, edging out the 23,000 TEU Jacques Saadé class that held the record from 2020. Both run on LNG, and Notre Dame is the first of ten sister ships due through 2028.
Why does a CMA CGM ship sometimes disappear from the map?
AIS coverage thins out in a few specific conditions: a transponder switched off deliberately in a high-risk or conflict-affected area, a genuine equipment fault, or simply a stretch of ocean far enough from both coastal receivers and satellite passes that the next position update takes longer to arrive. The ship hasn’t vanished. The next broadcast usually puts it back on the map within a short window once conditions clear.
Track the ships behind the story
MarineRadar follows 112,000+ vessels with satellite positions every 5 minutes. Search by name, MMSI or IMO — free on iOS and Android.
