CMA CGM Container Tracking

Seven owner codes trace the group’s structure rather than one company’s history. CMAU, CGMU and ECMU are the core CMA CGM codes; APZU, APLU and APHU arrived with APL, the American line CMA CGM acquired and kept as a distinct brand; CNCU belongs to CNC, the group’s intra-Asia arm. All seven are registered under ISO 6346 and every one of them tracks on cma-cgm.com.

A box stencilled APL sailing under a CMA CGM booking is therefore not a data error — it is the group’s own equipment pool at work, shuffled between brands as capacity demands.

Paperwork from CMA CGM starts with CMDU — a SCAC that deliberately differs from every container prefix, which is why searching a CMDU number in a container-only tool fails. On the official tracker the same field takes CMDU bills of lading, booking references and container numbers, and the B/L view is the better choice for multi-container shipments because it lists every box under the document.

Two things stand out from our browser tests. First, results include a live map with the vessel’s position — a visual most rivals reserve for paid platforms. Second, URL parameters are stripped before the page loads, so nobody can hand you a link that opens your result directly; the bot wall also means the page may challenge automated browsers, so use an ordinary one. The CMA CGM app (iOS/Android) carries the same events with push notifications.

Not from the container. A standard dry box has no power, no radio and no satellite receiver — it is a steel case with a number painted on it, and it reports nothing about itself. Every position you see against a CMA CGM shipment was reported by something else: a terminal crane, a gate reader, or the ship.

A live map on a carrier’s tracking page is almost always plotting AIS, the transponder every large vessel broadcasts with its position, course and speed. That is genuinely useful at sea: it is a real position rather than a schedule, and an ETA recalculated from actual movement. It is also the ship’s position, not your box’s, and the two part company the moment the container is discharged.

On land the map goes quiet. Between the gate-out and the delivery there is no vessel to follow, and the road leg appears only as whatever events the terminal and the trucker report. A container sitting on a chassis in a yard shows the last position of a ship it left days ago. Only specialised IoT equipment reports its own location, and wherever that exists it is a paid product sold to the shipper, not something a tracking page gives away.

How long a container spends at sea on CMA CGM services, port to port. Each figure below is stated by two documents for the same service and the same pair of ports — the line’s own schedule and one more — and both are linked beside it. Where we could not find two, the pair is not listed.

These are schedule figures between two ports, not delivery times: add the days before the vessel sails and after it discharges, and expect the real voyage to drift by a few days either way. A line can change a rotation at any time, so check the date on each source.

CMA CGM kept its acquisitions as live brands rather than folding them into one name, so the paperwork in your hand may say APL, CNC or ANL while the booking sits in CMA CGM systems. People who meet that for the first time go looking for an APL tracking page, find a brand site with no working search, and conclude their number is wrong.

It is not. The group runs one tracking back end: cma-cgm.com takes the number whichever brand issued the document, and the APL-registered prefixes — APZU, APLU and APHU — resolve there alongside CMAU, CGMU, ECMU and CNCU. If a brand site offers you its own search, it is a front end onto the same data.

Make sure the page actually loaded. CMA CGM runs heavy bot protection, and an automated or hardened browser can be challenged before the search ever runs. An empty result and a blocked page look similar; open the tracker in an ordinary browser session first.

Check the number. Seven prefixes across three brands make a misread first letter more likely here than at a line with two codes. The checker here recomputes the check digit and will name the character that does not fit.

Try the document instead of the box. A CMDU bill of lading lists every container under the shipment, so when one box returns nothing the B/L view usually shows whether the booking exists at all — which separates a typo from a shipment that has not started.

Too new, or archived. The first event appears at gate-in or loading rather than at booking, and completed shipments drop out of the live system after some weeks.