Shipping Heavy Machinery in Ocean Containers

If you need to ship heavy machinery from USA to countries overseas – most of the times the international machinery shipper will offer 2 options: flat rack container or roll-on roll-off heavy equipment shipping. Both of them are good options except for one little thing – the price.

With flat rack container shipping your heavy machinery will need to be loaded by an export packing warehouse onto the flat rack container. Loading charges are not cheap plus ocean carriers have very steep surcharges if the cargo is “out-of-gauge” – meaning over 8′ wide. Most of the excavators, back hoes, front loaders, cranes are well over 8′ wide. Also, getting a flat rack to some destinations is almost impossible.

With roll-on roll-off international heavy machinery shipping your cargo will be loaded onto the specialized vessel that doesn’t need any flat racks. The problem is the shipping cost is based on the size of your machine. The bigger the machine – the more you have to pay for overseas freight. Prices for shipping oversize machinery from USA to Europe are acceptable but nowadays majority of the construction machinery is being shipped to countries in Africa, Middle East and Latin America and ro/ro shipping rates to those destinations are quite high.

So is there an affordable shipping solution for transporting heavy machinery internationally? YES, there is. But it requires some creative loading. Basically, the cheapest way to ship machinery overseas is via container service. The problem is most of the construction, road building and agricultural machines are too big to fit inside the ocean containers. Cargo must be partially disassembled to make it fit inside the containers. It’s not an easy job but it can be done by some professional export packing warehouses.

Here’s an example of CAT loader that our company recently shipped to Africa:

Sure it takes a lot of labor to complete this job but oftentimes we’re able to save 2-3 thousand dollars in total shipping cost for our customers compared to roll-on roll-off costs. The only drawback is that the machine will have to be put together after it arrives to the final destination. A lot of our customers don’t have a problem with it as long as they have substantial savings on the international shipping cost on their heavy equipment.

So folks, next time you have a large piece of equipment to ship overseas and somebody is telling you that RO/RO is the only way to ship it – send us your request and we’ll provide you with the pricing for disassembling and shipping your machine via ocean container service.