CMA CGM Tracking: How to Find Your Container and Ship
CMA CGM tracking splits into two questions that people usually type as one search. The first is what happened to your box, which CMA CGM’s own portal answers well. The second is where the ship carrying it is right now, and that one needs a different tool entirely.
The pattern repeats for almost everyone who ships with them. You paste a container or booking number into CMA CGM’s tracking page, get a clean run of dated events, and the newest line reads loaded on board six days ago at Tanjung Pelepas. It still says that today. Nothing has failed. The portal logs checkpoints, not motion, and a ship somewhere in the Malacca Strait hasn’t reached the next one yet.
That ship has been broadcasting its position the whole time regardless. This is how you get from a CMA CGM reference number to that live position.
What CMA CGM's Own Tracking Actually Shows
CMA CGM is the third-largest container line by capacity, headquartered in Marseille, and its tracking page is built to answer one question properly: what is the current custody status of a specific shipment. Enter a container number, a booking reference or a bill of lading and it returns an event history running from empty release through gate in, loaded on board, any transhipment, discharge and final delivery, alongside the load and discharge ports, the carrying vessel’s name and the container’s own size and type.
What it does not show is anything between those checkpoints.
That’s not a design flaw. A tracking system built around custody records exists to record custody changes, because custody is the thing CMA CGM is contractually accountable for. Nobody in Marseille updates a status page to say a ship is now 200 miles south of Colombo doing 18 knots. That information exists, it’s free, and almost nobody who searches CMA CGM tracking ever gets to it.
CMA CGM Container Prefixes: CMAU, CGMU and CXDU
A container number is eleven characters under ISO 6346: three letters for the owner, a fourth letter for equipment category, six serial digits, one check digit. CMA CGM’s own boxes carry a handful of registered prefixes.
| Prefix | Notes |
|---|---|
| CMAU | The line’s primary and most common code |
| CGMU | CMA CGM, registered separately from CMAU |
| CXDU | CMA CGM |
| ECMU | CMA CGM |
The line’s SCAC code, used in US customs and trade paperwork rather than on the steel itself, is CMDU. If your box carries a different four letters ending in U, it’s leased rather than owned, and that changes nothing about where to look for status: CMA CGM issued your bill of lading, so CMA CGM’s system holds the record no matter who owns the container itself.
Check the final digit before assuming a search has failed. It’s a checksum calculated from the other ten characters, built specifically to make a typo error out rather than quietly return someone else’s shipment.
How to Track a CMA CGM Shipment Step by Step
The first few steps are what everyone already does. The rest is what actually gets you a live position.
Step 1: Collect your container, booking or BL number
Pull whichever reference you have from the booking confirmation, bill of lading or shipping documents. CMA CGM’s portal accepts any of the three.
Step 2: Enter it on CMA CGM’s tracking page
The event list comes back chronological, so the line worth reading is the last one, not the first.
Step 3: Find the loaded on board entry
This is the line that names the vessel and, usually, a voyage code. Copy it exactly, suffix included.
Step 4: Note the IMO number if it’s shown
Fleet names get reused across sister ships. An IMO number never changes for the life of a hull, so search on that when one is available.
Step 5: Open MarineRadar and search the ship name
Enter the vessel name or IMO number in the search bar. The result gives you a live position, speed over ground, course, the destination the crew has entered, an ETA and the track the ship has actually sailed so far.
Step 6: Read the ship’s behaviour, not just the ETA field
A ship holding 18 knots on a straight line is doing what the schedule expects. One making two knots in slow circles ten miles off your discharge port is queuing for a berth, and its ETA field will keep advertising the same date while it does.
Step 7: Set a zone alert instead of refreshing the map
Draw an area around your discharge port and get told the moment the ship crosses in, rather than checking the page every few hours.
Step 8: Group several shipments into one fleet
Once you’re moving cargo on three or four ships at a time, tracking them one search at a time gets old fast. Our guide on tracking multiple container ships covers grouping them properly.
CMA CGM Vessel Tracking: Why AIS Can't See a Container Number
Every commercial ship above a certain size transmits AIS, the Automatic Identification System, over VHF. Coastal stations pick it up near land, satellites pick it up further out, continuously, whether or not anyone is watching. The message a live map reads from that broadcast covers position, speed over ground, course and heading, navigational status, the destination and ETA typed in by the crew, draught, and the vessel’s own name with its MMSI and IMO numbers. Cargo has never been part of that broadcast, and no AIS receiver anywhere has ever reported a container number.
That’s the entire reason a live map can’t resolve a booking reference.
It’s also the reason the two systems complement rather than compete: CMA CGM knows which box sits on which ship, AIS knows where that ship is, and the vessel name is what joins the two records together.
The Ocean Alliance: Why Your Box May Ride a COSCO, Evergreen or OOCL Ship
CMA CGM’s deep-sea network runs largely through the Ocean Alliance, an operational partnership with COSCO, Evergreen and OOCL that has just been extended through 2032, longer than any comparable pact among the other major lines. The four members pool vessels and slots across 41 shared services rather than running separate strings, with roughly 394 ships assigned to the alliance in total and about a third of those operated by CMA CGM itself.
What that means at the search bar: a CMA CGM booking can genuinely load onto a COSCO, Evergreen or OOCL-flagged ship, and the reverse happens just as often. If the loaded on board line on your CMA CGM tracking page names a vessel you don’t recognise from CMA CGM’s own funnel colours, that’s the alliance doing its job rather than an error on the page. Readers coming at this from the other direction can check our COSCO container tracking, Evergreen container tracking or OOCL container tracking guides, which walk through the same handoff from each of those three sides. Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd run a separate pact of their own, the Gemini Cooperation, covered in our Maersk container tracking guide, and the two networks don’t swap vessels with each other.
Tracking the CMA CGM Jacques Saadé and the Rest of the Fleet
None of this needs an actual shipment attached to it. CMA CGM Jacques Saadé, IMO 9839179, was the first 23,000 TEU vessel in the world built to run on LNG, delivered in 2020 and named for the line’s founder. She’s the lead ship of a nine-vessel class built specifically to anchor CMA CGM’s Asia-Europe strings, and her MarineRadar page carries the same live position, speed and route history as whichever far smaller feeder happens to be carrying your own booking. Route history is the part worth lingering on. A single dot tells you where a ship is; the track behind it tells you what kind of passage it’s actually had, including any diversion around a chokepoint.
Our piece on planning a container ship route goes through how canal choices, speed and weather reshape a voyage that looks perfectly straight on paper.
Why the CMA CGM ETA and the Live Map Disagree
Sooner or later CMA CGM will promise Thursday while the map shows the ship arriving Monday, and you’ll want to know which figure to trust. Neither is wrong. CMA CGM’s date is a commercial estimate for the whole door-to-door journey, transhipment legs and inland haulage included. The AIS ETA is something a deck officer typed in for the next port only, not always refreshed, and it will often keep showing the last port for a day or two after the ship has actually left.
A vessel can dock on Monday while your container only clears the gate on Thursday, with discharge, customs and a truck booking sitting in between.
Berth waiting is the delay neither figure shows until it has already happened, and it’s the single most common reason a schedule slips. Trust the speed and track for the ship. Trust CMA CGM’s own dates for the cargo.
What Usually Goes Wrong
- No vessel is named yet, because the box is still sitting at a depot or gated in but not loaded. There’s nothing to search until it’s aboard.
- The named ship changed partway through. Transhipment, and under the Ocean Alliance a mid-voyage switch to a partner’s vessel, are both routine, and the portal can lag behind the actual loading.
- Someone pasted the container number straight into the map search bar. It will never resolve there, for the reasons above.
- Two ships in the fleet share a near-identical name. The IMO number settles it every time.
Who Actually Uses Both Halves
Importers plan warehouse labour around CMA CGM’s own dates and use the live map to check whether those dates still hold as the voyage progresses. Freight forwarders use it to answer a client in the gap between official status updates, which is usually the difference between a routine call and an awkward one. Hauliers care the most, because a truck booked against a ship still queuing outside a port is a paid slot going to waste. Ship spotters skip the tracking portal entirely and go straight to the fleet, which is honestly how a lot of people end up installing a live map in the first place.
Conclusion
Use CMA CGM’s own portal for what it does well, which is the state of your cargo and the name of the ship carrying it. Take that name to a live map and let a zone alert replace the habit of refreshing a page that only updates at fixed checkpoints. Neither half tells the whole story alone.
MarineRadar is free to start on Android and iPhone. Search the vessel name from your CMA CGM status page and you’ll have it on screen within seconds.
FAQs
What does CMA CGM stand for in shipping?
CMA is Compagnie Maritime d’Affrètement, the line Jacques Saadé founded in Marseille in 1978. CGM is Compagnie Générale Maritime, a formerly state-owned French line CMA merged with two decades later, which is where the second half of the name comes from.
Where is my CMA CGM container now?
CMA CGM’s own tracking page tells you the shipment’s custody status: the last checkpoint it passed, such as loaded on board or discharged. For the ship’s actual position at this moment, take the vessel name from that status page and search it on a live AIS map like MarineRadar.
What is a CMA container?
A container carrying one of CMA CGM’s registered prefixes, most commonly CMAU.
How many containers does CMA CGM have?
CMA CGM doesn’t publish an exact count of the boxes it owns and leases, and the figure moves constantly as equipment is added, scrapped or returned. What is public is vessel capacity: CMA CGM operates several hundred ships with a combined slot capacity above 4 million TEU, third in the world behind MSC and Maersk.
Can I track a CMA CGM container by the container number on MarineRadar?
No, and no live ship map anywhere can, because AIS carries vessel data only. Get the ship name from CMA CGM’s own tracking page first, then search that name on MarineRadar.
Why does my CMA CGM tracking page name a ship that isn't one of theirs?
The Ocean Alliance. CMA CGM pools vessels and sailing slots with COSCO, Evergreen and OOCL across dozens of shared services, so a CMA CGM booking regularly loads onto a partner’s ship and vice versa. It’s routine, not an error on the page.
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