Cabotage in Brazil: How Freight Forwarders Can Operate It

Brazil’s coastal shipping (cabotagem) moved 4.8 million TEUs in 2025, according to ANTAQ, helping push total shipping volume to a record 15.3 million TEUs. The BR do Mar program has lowered barriers for foreign-flagged vessels in coastal trade and simplified licensing for Brazilian carriers since 2022, bringing more terminal investment and more frequent sailings. For freight forwarders, cabotage means domestic corridors that replace long-haul trucking at a lower cost per ton-kilometer with predictable transit times. But the operations work differently from deep-sea shipping or trucking in ways that matter day to day.

Cabotage is growing, and most forwarders haven’t caught up

Most freight forwarders in Brazil built their operations around two modes: international ocean (FCL and LCL on Asia-Brazil and Europe-Brazil trades) and air (Viracopos, Guarulhos, Galeao). Trucking is the final delivery leg from port to warehouse. When cabotage comes up, it gets treated as a one-off, managed outside the system with separate spreadsheets and direct calls to the coastal carrier.

Shippers, though, are already there. Pulp and paper, chemicals, electronics: these sectors have moved part of their volume to coastal corridors. The Manaus Free Trade Zone has shipped containers by cabotage between Manaus and Santos for years, and volumes have climbed as sailing frequency improved. On the Northeast-Southeast corridor, industrial inputs and consumer goods that used to travel three to four days by truck between Suape and Santos now sail in four to five days, without cargo theft risk or diesel price swings.

Forwarders that already offer cabotage pick up business that competitors locked into international ocean cannot. And shippers who find that cabotage works for their corridor will switch providers if their current forwarder does not operate the mode.

What changes operationally when cargo moves by cabotage

If you know deep-sea shipping, the cabotage structure looks familiar: booking with a carrier, containers, port terminals, bills of lading. The differences show up in the details.

Cabotage bookings go through carriers specialized in Brazil’s coastal trade. Alianca (now part of Hamburg Sud/Maersk), Log-in Logistica, and Mercosul Line run the main routes. Sailings are less frequent than deep-sea: weekly or biweekly depending on the corridor and port. Cargo that misses the sailing window in Santos may sit seven to fourteen days waiting for the next vessel, versus two or three days on busy international routes. Planning around that gap matters.

Cabotage terminals inside a port are not always the same ones handling deep-sea vessels. In Santos, cabotage operations may run at a different terminal from the one receiving international ships. Sending a truck to the wrong terminal costs time and demurrage.

Documentation gets simpler in one way and harder in another. Cabotage skips the international CE Mercante registration and AFRMM collection because the cargo never crosses a border. The bill of lading is domestic. But the operation requires a transport invoice (CT-e), and when cargo continues by truck after the maritime leg, a separate CT-e must be issued for each segment. The domestic maritime paperwork has to line up with the trucking paperwork at both ends.

Intermodal coordination is part of nearly every cabotage operation. Cargo gets discharged at the destination port and continues by truck to the warehouse. A door-to-door operation means coordinating terminal discharge, container release, trucking contracts, and delivery, all within the cabotage carrier’s free time. Free time management matters as much in cabotage as in deep-sea shipping, and cabotage carriers tend to offer less of it.

Three corridors that already work for freight forwarders

Cabotage covers all of Brazil’s coastline, but three corridors carry most of the freight-forwarding volume.

The Manaus-Santos corridor (and Manaus-Paranagua) moves products from the Manaus Free Trade Zone to southeastern and southern Brazil: electronics, motorcycles, components. Going the other way, raw materials and inputs travel from Santos to Manaus. Transit takes five to seven days, against thirty or more by road (where a road exists). On this corridor, trucking simply cannot compete on time or cost.

The Southeast-Northeast corridor (Santos or Paranagua to Suape, Salvador, or Pecem) carries consumer goods, industrial inputs, chemicals, and construction materials. Maritime transit takes three to five days, similar to trucking over the same distance, but cheaper per ton and without cargo theft risk on the highways. After the trucker strike at the Port of Santos in July 2026, which halted container pickups and delayed shipments, several shippers started keeping part of their volume on coastal shipping as a backup.

The third corridor handles containerized bulk and commodities (cellulose, bagged grains, coffee), using cabotage as a domestic leg to the export hub port. Cargo leaves a smaller port by cabotage, arrives at Santos or Paranagua, and transfers to a deep-sea vessel. Offering the cabotage leg as part of a full export service gives forwarders an edge that trucking-only competitors lack.

The real cost is door to door, not port to port

Cabotage is cheaper per ton-kilometer than long-haul trucking. Every port-to-port comparison confirms that. But no cabotage operation is port to port: cargo has to reach the origin port by truck and leave the destination port by truck.

How much the trucking legs cost depends on the distance between the shipper’s warehouse and the cabotage terminal, and between the destination terminal and the consignee’s warehouse. When both ends sit close to ports with cabotage service (a factory in Cubatao shipping to a customer in Recife, say), the trucking legs are short and cheap. When the warehouse is 300 kilometers from the nearest cabotage terminal, those legs can eat up half the savings cabotage offered over direct long-haul trucking.

Terminal handling adds up too. Cabotage means loading and unloading at two port terminals (origin and destination), plus truck loading and unloading at both ends. Each handling event costs money and time. THC, container moves at the terminal, and potential storage at the destination port are costs that direct trucking avoids entirely.

Anyone quoting cabotage to a shipper needs to quote door to door. That means adding up the cabotage freight, THC at both terminals, trucking at both ends, storage, and handling, then comparing against direct door-to-door trucking. The comparison between quotes that is already hard in international ocean gets harder with another mode in the chain.

On corridors where the maritime distance is long and the trucking legs are short (Manaus-Santos, Santos-Suape), the numbers usually work well. For intermediate distances (Sao Paulo-Salvador, for example), it depends on volume, frequency, and the rate you negotiate with the cabotage carrier.

How Tier2 Cargo handles multimodal operations

Cabotage operations in Tier2 Cargo use the process types the system already has. The domestic maritime leg goes in as an ocean process with milestones adjusted for the coastal flow: booking, loading, transit, discharge at the destination port. The trucking legs go in as road processes linked to the main maritime process.

Margin shows up in the consolidated view: projected profit at quoting, invoiced amounts, and realized profit at settlement cover the whole operation, including the cabotage carrier cost, THC at both terminals, and trucking at both ends. You can tell whether the door-to-door operation actually delivered margin or the trucking legs ate what cabotage saved on freight.

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Adding cabotage as a regular service opens corridors that international-ocean-only competitors do not cover and that pure trucking companies cannot price the same way. The practical starting point: pick a corridor where the numbers work, quote door to door with terminal and trucking costs included, and run three to five operations to sort out the workflow before offering the service as standard.