US Charges Four Container Manufacturers with Cartel Conspiracy
The United States Department of Justice has brought charges against four of the globe’s biggest shipping container producers and seven of their executives for allegedly orchestrating a cartel that roughly doubled the cost of standard dry containers across a four-year span and propelled profits at one firm nearly a hundredfold higher during the COVID-19 pandemic.
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The superseding indictment, made public on Monday by the US District Court for the Northern District of California, accuses CIMC, Singamas Container Holdings, Dong Fang International Containers, and CXIC Group Containers of colluding to curb output and set prices for standard non-refrigerated shipping containers from as early as November 2019 through at least January 2024, breaching the Sherman Antitrust Act.
One executive, Vick Nam Hing Ma, a marketing director at Singamas, was taken into custody in France on April 14, and his extradition to the United States is still pending. Six other co-defendants remain fugitives, among them Singamas chairman and CEO Siong Seng Teo and CIMC’s former president and CEO Boliang Mai.
According to the indictment, the conspiracy took concrete shape on November 14, 2019, when executives from CIMC, Dong Fang, and CXIC gathered at CIMC’s Shenzhen headquarters and decided to reduce production by cutting shifts and hours on dry container assembly lines. To enforce the agreement, the cartel placed 87 surveillance cameras across 49 production lines. A system of financial penalties was set up to discipline any member that surpassed its allocated output quota. Singamas joined the scheme by at least March 2020.
The impact on pricing was severe. CIMC’s container manufacturing earnings jumped from $19.8 million in 2019 to $288 million in 2020 and $1.75 billion in 2021. Singamas went from a $110 million net loss in 2019 to a $186.8 million profit in 2021.
Omeed Assefi, acting assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, said that global price-fixing cartels strike at the core of economic freedom. He stated that the defendants took the world’s supply of ocean shipping containers hostage during the pandemic when supply chains were most in need, and that ordinary Americans ended up paying more and waiting longer for essential goods as a consequence.
A violation of the Sherman Act carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison and a $1 million criminal fine for individuals, and up to $100 million for corporations, with fines potentially doubling if the gains or losses exceed the statutory ceiling.
The indictment follows a prolonged probe involving the FBI, the US Postal Service Office of Inspector General, and the General Services Administration Office of Inspector General, with French authorities helping to secure Ma’s arrest.
The US action comes amid heightened regulatory attention on the container shipping sector on both sides of the Pacific. Earlier this month, China’s Ministry of Transport penalized nine international container shipping lines and seven NVOCCs for violating its container freight-rate filing rules, following port inspections conducted at Guangzhou, Qingdao, and Ningbo in the second half of 2025. The lines cited included MSC, CMA CGM, Hapag-Lloyd, Ocean Network Express, Evergreen Marine, Wan Hai Lines, SM Line, Emirates Shipping Line, and TS Lines.
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