Coreline International — International sea | corelineinternational.com
How to turn a stack of cartons into cubic metres, how many pallets fit on a container floor, and the volume at which a full box beats sharing one.
Cubic metres — CBM on most quotes — are just length x width x height in metres for each package, summed. A carton of 0.60 x 0.40 x 0.50 m is 0.12 m³; fifty of them are 6 m³. Do this for every line of the packing list before asking for rates, because both LCL and FCL decisions start from that total.
Palletised cargo is faster to estimate. A EUR pallet of 1,200 x 800 mm covers 0.96 m²; multiply by its stacked height for cubic metres. On the floor, a 20 ft container takes about 10 EUR pallets and a 40 ft about 20, before any racking or second tier is added.
LCL prices space per cubic metre and treats 1 m³ as 1,000 kg: if the cargo is denser than that, it pays on weight instead of volume. This weight-or-measure rule is why two shipments of identical size can be quoted very differently.
On narrow screens, swipe or scroll the plate sideways.
The crossover sits at roughly 14-16 m³. Below it, LCL's per-metre pricing usually beats the flat cost of a box; above it, a full 20 ft container — about 33 m³ — usually costs less per cubic metre and also means the cargo is handled as one sealed unit.
Air freight draws the line elsewhere: chargeable weight is length x width x height in centimetres divided by 5,000. A bulky 6 m³ shipment that is cheap by sea can price as over a tonne by air, so urgent cargo is worth quoting on both modes.
The sequence is always the same: measure, sum, compare with 33, 67-68 and 76 m³, then check the total weight against the payload of the box you have in mind.
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