NAVIGATING 2026: Transport operators become the reluctant primary customer

THIS month, I want to focus on a topic that has been raised repeatedly in industry discussions and that several stakeholders have specifically asked me to investigate more deeply. 

These discussions were about the evolving structure of Australia’s container terminal revenue model. What began as incremental adjustments in access and ancillary charges has, over time, developed into something far more significant. Recent data from the latest July 2026 increases prompted a closer examination of how these elements interact when viewed in aggregate. Individually, these charges are often treated as operational pricing decisions. Taken together, the July 2026 increases now constitute a clear inflection point, in which transport operators effectively emerge as the primary customer within the terminal revenue framework.

From partners to ATMs — The revenue shift

The ACCC’s Container Stevedoring Monitoring Report 2024–25, the product of 27 years of continuous monitoring and the most detailed longitudinal dataset of its kind in the southern hemisphere, documents the shift with precision. In 2009–10, shipping lines provided 88.6% of stevedore revenue. In 2024–25, that figure has collapsed to 50.5%. The gap has been filled almost entirely by transport operators, trucking companies and freight forwarders, through Terminal Access Charges and a suite of landside fees that barely existed a decade ago.

At the stevedore level, transport operators pay approximately 49.5% of all revenue: $642 million in Terminal Access Charges alone, plus a further $508 million in other landside fees, including vehicle booking system charges, weight misdeclaration fees, and ancillary gate levies. None of these are negotiated. All are set unilaterally, published publicly, and collected from parties who have no contractual relationship with the stevedore and no ability to refuse.

The ECP multiplier

Layer in the empty container park ecosystem and the inversion is not just complete, it is accelerating. ECP gate fees, charged to trucking companies returning or collecting empty containers, began in 2016 as a $5.50 administrative charge per gate leg. They have since become a significant and rapidly growing revenue stream. Updated data as of July 2026, covering 67 ECP operators across all five capital city ports, reveals how far this has gone.

At Sydney’s most expensive depots, SWIFT Logistics ($269.28 per leg), ACFS and the TYNE networks ($258–$260 per leg), a trucking company completing a standard import and export container cycle at Port Botany faces a combined burden of Terminal Access Charge, Vehicle Booking System fee, and ECP of between $637 and $786 per container. Every dollar is non-negotiable, set unilaterally by operators with whom the trucker has no commercial relationship, and paid without any right of objection.

When stevedore landside charges and ECP gate fees are combined, transport operators now account for approximately 68% of the total revenue pool, up from essentially zero in 2010. Shipping lines, once the near-exclusive funder of Australian terminal infrastructure, have been repositioned to a minority 32% share. And that share continues to shrink.

Profits without productivity

What elevates this beyond a pricing grievance is the productivity paradox running through the ACCC's data. Stevedore operating profit rose 130% over five years to a record $808 million. EBITDA margins reached 34.8%, the highest in 27 years of monitoring, more than double the industrials sector benchmark, and returns that would make most infrastructure investors blush. Return on tangible assets hit 45%.

None of this was earned through improved performance, and the reasons why are more nuanced than simple profiteering. Quayside crane productivity fell from 64.8 containers per hour in 2019–20 to 56.6 in 2024–25. Australia's crane density is low by international standards, and terminal productivity is genuinely a shared challenge. Vessel productivity depends as much on shipping line coordination, berth scheduling, and arrival discipline as it does on the stevedore. That constraint is real, and responsibility for it sits across multiple parties.

What is harder to excuse is that five years of record profits have not been meaningfully reinvested to close that infrastructure gap. Truck turnaround times increased. Terminal utilisation sits at a seven-year low of 62%, significant spare capacity co-existing with record prices. The margin has been extracted through landside charges on captive customers while the underlying productivity problem remains unresolved. The ACCC's conclusion is measured but pointed: the profits reflect market structure, not operational merit, a small number of operators, publicly posted prices, and a customer base with no countervailing power and nowhere else to go.

Why it will force a regulatory response

Transport operators did not choose to become the primary funders of Australian terminal infrastructure. They were made so, incrementally and by design, by operators who discovered that landside charges could be raised unilaterally without commercial consequence. Trucking companies must use whichever terminal a shipping line has contracted, pay whatever that terminal sets, and have no forum to contest it. They are not customers in any meaningful commercial sense. They are a captive revenue source.

What makes this a cost-of-living issue, not just an industry grievance, is what happens next. Transport operators do not absorb these charges; they pass them on, typically with a margin, to importers and exporters, who embed them in the price of goods. Every non-negotiable dollar extracted at the terminal gate travels the full length of the supply chain and lands on the consumer. It is a broken pass-through system. Each layer adds margin on top of a charge that was never commercially justified to begin with. The ACCC's own data makes this visible. With an estimated $1.7 billion in non-negotiable landside charges now extracted annually from the supply chain, charges that did not exist a decade ago, the cumulative price level effect on imported consumer goods is measurable, persistent, and still growing. This is not a rounding error in the cost-of-living debate. It is a structural inflation driver hiding in plain sight.

The July 2026 ECP increases, pushing the national average above $150 per leg and Sydney above $195, are the moment that changes the regulatory calculus. The ACCC has twice stopped short of formal intervention, but its own finding that these profits are "structural and unlikely to be transient" is an admission that the market will not self-correct. I anticipate the next report will mark the beginning of formal intervention. 

The regional port advantage, time to play it

A market response is forming that does not require waiting for regulation, and regional ports are at the centre of it. The five major capital city ports are locked into this charge regime, and some regional ports are beginning to follow the same pricing path, a strategic mistake. The real opportunity is the opposite: to look at what the capital city model has become and deliberately position against it.

Regional ports that serve their hinterland communities well understand that trade facilitation is their core purpose. Lower landside costs, simpler access arrangements, shorter drayage distances, and reduced emissions for freight that never needs to transit a capital city terminal. These are not just commercial advantages; they are genuine contributions to the economic and environmental wellbeing of regional communities. A port authority whose incentive is to grow throughput rather than extract margin is a fundamentally different infrastructure partner for local industry, exporters, and importers alike. Regional ports should back themselves and play to their advantage.

The July 2026 inflection point

July 2026 marks a clear line in the sand. Transport operators have become the primary funders of Australia's terminal infrastructure without a contract, without representation in the pricing framework, and without meaningful choice over the charges imposed on them. That cost does not stop at the port gate. It cascades through every layer of the supply chain, embeds itself in landed costs, and surfaces in the price of imported goods paid by every Australian household. It is a structural inflation driver that is no longer hidden.

This is the inflection point. For every business in the supply chain, FY27 is the right moment to look beyond the invoice and ask harder questions. Where are your containers moving, and why? Which charges are you absorbing by default that a different routing, a different depot arrangement, or a different modal choice might avoid? And as Scope 3 emissions reporting obligations tighten this financial year, how does your current supply chain design stand up; not just on cost, but on carbon? The two questions are increasingly the same question.

The ACCC has the data, the mandate, and now the political context to act. Regional ports have a genuine strategic opening to reposition as lower-cost, lower-emission alternatives for their catchment communities. And every participant in the supply chain has both the incentive and the obligation to use this moment to find a better way. The question heading into FY27 is not whether this structure continues to change. It is whether your business is ready for the opportunities that change will create.