CMA CGM has stopped treating West Africa as a single coastline.

On 15 July 2026 the French carrier announced that it is splitting the range in two. In the north, a new weekly service, KORA EXPRESS, will link northern Europe to Tema, Lekki, Cotonou and Dakar with 4,200-TEU ships, sailing first from Southampton on 26 August. In the south, EURAF 5 is repositioned onto a Tanger Med — Nouakchott — Kribi — Libreville — Pointe-Noire — Luanda rotation, worked by seven vessels of up to 4,200 TEU.

What matters to a Cameroonian shipper is narrow and concrete: the loop that serves the country is now sized for Central Africa, with Kribi as its national call, rather than shared with markets whose volumes and berthing windows have nothing in common with it. Whether that converts into steadier windows and shorter door-to-door times will only be readable after several rotations. The published material gives neither port-to-port transit times for the southern range nor a switchover date, and this brief does not extrapolate them.

The sequence is the second point. On 9 June 2026, MSC had already folded Kribi into its sub-Saharan intermodal network — a single sea-and-land contract, up to four weekly calls, and trucking legs to Yaoundé, N'Djamena, Moundou and Bangui. Two of the world's three largest carriers have therefore, inside eight weeks, settled on arrangements that make Kribi a mainline entry point for the CEMAC hinterland. All of it against a softening freight market: Drewry's composite World Container Index stood at $4,255 per 40ft box on 30 July 2026, down 3% week on week.

The read-across: adding services while rates ease is a network decision, not a response to the spot market. It commits assets across several seasons. And it says nothing about a pecking order among Cameroon's ports — Douala remains the historic gateway and handles the bulk of the country's containerised trade. What is happening here is added capacity and added routing options.

Container News (15 Jul 2026); Logistics Manager (9 Jun 2026); Drewry World Container Index (30 Jul 2026); Leadership Nigeria (3 Aug 2026); Investir au Cameroun (1 and 4 Aug 2026).