A buyer compares two offers for the same container. The first quotes FOB, the second quotes delivered to his warehouse. He works out the gap, finds it enormous, and concludes that the second is expensive.
Six weeks later he has paid the first one twice: once to the supplier, once in charges he had not budgeted. The FOB price was correct. It simply contained almost nothing.
The full chain, line by line
Here is everything that separates goods loaded on board from goods unloaded at your door.
The FOB price. The cargo, placed on board at origin. It is the only part most buyers compare.
Ocean freight. Variable, public, negotiable, and rarely the decisive line on a West African run.
Terminal handling at both ends. Charged by the terminals, non negotiable, routinely left out of comparisons.
Duties and import taxes. Customs duty by tariff heading, statistical fee, community levies, VAT. VAT is recoverable for a registered business, but it still leaves the account.
Port handling. Discharge, quay transfer, storage, scanning where applicable.
Dwell, and what it triggers. This is the first hidden line. A container that stays past free time triggers daily demurrage and storage. An incomplete file is enough to turn a normal operation into a heavy invoice.
Inland transport. The least understood leg. Road carries 75 to 90 percent of inland freight in Sub-Saharan Africa according to the African Development Bank, and the World Bank has shown that road prices on the corridors carry margins of 60 to 160 percent in West and Central Africa, on operating costs comparable to other developing regions.
Inter state transit, where the destination is landlocked. Bond, escort on some axes, stops at the posts.
Insurance. Often placed too late or badly sized, sometimes not at all.
The cost of money. Between paying the supplier and selling on, your cash finances the cargo. In the West African monetary union the average lending rate was around 6.73 percent in 2025, with the usury ceiling at 14 percent for banks. Over a three month cycle that is not a rounding error.
Losses and damage. They appear on no offer and are paid out of margin.
Where the money actually hides
Three lines account for most of the difference between two comparable files.
Time at the port. Every day of dwell beyond free time is paid twice, in demurrage and in tied up cash. That line depends almost entirely on the quality of the file lodged before the vessel arrives.
Inland transport. This is where the organisational margin sits, for the reasons we have set out elsewhere: freight allocated by queue, low truck utilisation, 30 to 40 percent of trucks running back empty.
Stops on the road. As early as 2007, the West African Economic and Monetary Union and ECOWAS created an Observatory of Abnormal Practices on inter state routes. The payments cost; the hours cost more.
How to read a delivered offer
A good delivered offer shows four things.
It lists what is included and what is not. No vague wording: every line appears, including those we do not invoice ourselves.
It names the exact delivery point. Delivered where, unloaded or not, with or without waiting time.
It gives a duration. A price without a lead time is not a price.
It says what happens if the cargo is held. Who pays demurrage, under what conditions, and who follows it up.
An offer that does not do those four things is not cheaper. It is less complete.
What we charge, and what we save
We quote delivered, and we itemise. On most files we take over from clients who were organising it themselves, the saving does not come from a better road rate: it comes from dwell days avoided, demurrage that never triggers, and stops that do not happen because the file is complete.
That is less spectacular than a discount on freight, and considerably larger.
Send us a recent import invoice with all its lines. We will tell you, line by line, where your money went and what was avoidable.
Sources: World Bank, Transport Prices and Costs in Africa (road transport costs, prices and margins on corridors); African Development Bank (road share of inland freight); Central Bank of West African States (average lending rate and usury ceilings); WAEMU and ECOWAS, Observatory of Abnormal Practices; corridor authorities on empty return legs.