Seemleius International is a logistics and supply chain solutions provider working with manufacturers, exporters, importers, traders and project cargo customers across India — and the partner network that carries their freight to the rest of the world.
The Seemleius group has been in logistics and supply chain for 20+ years, headquartered in Dubai, UAE. Seemleius International Pvt. Ltd. is its independent India branch, and it is the business behind this site — Indian gateways, Indian customs, Indian working hours, and a team you can reach on the same day you email them.
That combination is the point. A group presence means agents on the lanes that matter and the volume to negotiate properly with carriers. A local branch means the person planning your shipment understands what an Indian shipping bill actually requires, which commissionerate is slow this month, and how to reach a customs officer before a query becomes a demurrage bill.
We work out of two offices — Cochin and Mumbai — covering the west coast container ports and the southern air gateways between them. Both handle the full service range: air and ocean freight, customs clearance and trade compliance, warehousing and distribution, project cargo and heavy lift, door-to-door management, and packing, office moves and household moves.
Documentation, mostly. Freight is a commodity — anyone can buy space on a vessel. What separates a shipment that arrives from one that sits is whether the paperwork was right the first time: classification that survives scrutiny, valuation that matches the invoice, licences applied for before they are needed rather than after a query is raised.
We keep that work in-house rather than handing it to a broker. The person who booked your freight is the person who files your entry, so a documentation question does not turn into a three-day email chain between two companies who each think the other is handling it.
We do not own vessels or aircraft, and we do not carry volume commitments that have to be fed regardless of whether the service suits your cargo. On any given lane there are usually three or four sensible answers, and they differ in transit, in reliability and sometimes by a factor on price. Being free to pick between them is worth more to a shipper than any discount tied to a single line.
It also changes what we can tell you honestly. When a carrier’s schedule integrity on a lane goes from good to poor, we can say so and move you rather than defend a service we are obliged to sell.
We would rather show our working than make claims.
Freight goes wrong sometimes. What matters is whether there is a named person who owns it when it does.
Founder & Chief Executive Officer
Sheela founded Seemleius International and leads its operations, with over twenty years across freight forwarding, moving and supply chain management. She remains directly involved day to day — from how a lane is priced to how an escalation is handled. Her focus is the thing this company is judged on: that what was quoted is what gets invoiced, and that someone senior is reachable when a shipment does not go to plan.
Promoter & Co-Founder
Rajesh co-founded the company and directs carrier relations, rate procurement and operational governance. He owns the relationships with the shipping lines and airlines the group books, which is what keeps a quoted rate standing and a service level from quietly slipping — across every trade lane rather than only the busy ones.
Strategic Partner — Business Development
Manish develops the commercial business across India and the GCC, structuring door-to-door and project-cargo programmes for manufacturers, exporters and trading houses. He is usually the first senior person a new client speaks to, and he stays on the file after the first shipment rather than handing it on.
Below that the structure is deliberately flat. Coordinators hold their own files end to end and can rebook, re-route or spend money to protect a delivery date without waiting for a committee.
Across the two offices the team has come up through Indian ports and Indian customs houses — people who have filed entries, argued a classification and stood on a dock at two in the morning waiting for a survey. That is the experience the site is selling. There is no call centre and no ticket queue behind the phone number at the top of this page.
Charges are itemised before you book — freight, terminal handling, documentation, clearance, delivery. Where a cost genuinely cannot be fixed in advance, such as detention on a delayed vessel, we say so at quotation rather than adding it at the end.
You get a named person who knows your commodity, your buyers and your deadlines. They stay with the file from booking to proof of delivery, so you are not re-explaining the shipment to whoever picked up the ticket.
If a sailing is rolled or an entry is queried, you hear it from us before you hear it from your customer. A problem you know about on Monday is a rebooking; the same problem on Thursday is a missed delivery window.
We will not undervalue a consignment or misdeclare a commodity to save duty, and we will tell you plainly when a request crosses that line. It is the least popular thing we do and the reason our customers survive audits.
Three pallets to Sharjah and a transformer to Dar es Salaam run through the same sequence. The detail changes enormously; the order does not.
You send the commodity, the packing, the weight and volume, the two addresses and the date it has to land. An HS code helps; a photograph of a packing list will do to start with. Expect questions back the same working day, usually about packing and stackability — that is what decides whether your cargo pays for one pallet position or three.
Where both modes are plausible we price both, and more than one carrier on the lane. What comes back is a landed figure — origin haulage, terminal handling, freight, destination charges and clearance — with the genuinely variable items named as variable instead of buried in a single number.
Space is booked against a named vessel or flight and you get the gate-in and documentation deadlines in writing. Missing the documentation deadline is the commonest way a confirmed booking quietly becomes next week’s sailing.
Collection, packing where you have asked for it, stuffing under supervision and the export entry filed by our own team. Photographs of the loaded container go to you before the doors are sealed — they settle almost every later argument about condition and count.
You get the bill of lading or air waybill, then updates when something changes — a departure, a transhipment connection made or missed, an arrival date that has moved. Not a daily message confirming the vessel is still at sea.
The agent at the far end clears the consignment, arranges the last leg and confirms delivery. The file closes with what your own records need: delivery note, final invoice set against the original quotation, entry papers.
A freight quotation is four or five different businesses’ charges stitched together — a haulier, a terminal, a carrier, an agent, a customs authority. The temptation is to show one attractive number and let the rest surface at the destination, by which point the cargo is hostage. An amount you cannot break down is an amount you cannot check.
The build starts with chargeable weight, which is rarely what your weighbridge says. Air freight compares actual weight against volume at 6,000 cubic centimetres to the kilo, so a cubic metre of light cargo is charged as roughly 167 kg. Ocean LCL works on the freight ton — one tonne or one cubic metre, whichever is greater. Cargo that is light and bulky is priced on space; cargo that is dense is priced on mass. Knowing which one you have is the first honest thing a forwarder can tell you.
Then come the charges around the freight: terminal handling at both ends, bunker and currency adjustment, seasonal surcharges when space tightens, port security charges, documentation and the bill of lading itself. We separate them because they behave differently — some hold for a quarter, some change with the sailing — and lumping them together hides which of your costs are negotiable.
A few things genuinely cannot be fixed in advance, and pretending otherwise is worse than admitting it. Duty depends on a valuation the authority may take a different view of; demurrage and detention depend on how long the box sits; nobody schedules an examination. Those items appear on the quotation as named risks with the rate attached, so if one lands you already know the number.
Any forwarder who tells you nothing goes wrong has either not been trading long or is not telling you when it does. Vessels get overbooked and cargo gets rolled. Transhipment connections are missed. Entries get queried. What a customer is entitled to is a straight account of what has happened and a set of options, on the day it happens.
You will hear about it the same working day, with the next departure, the alternative carrier and — where the deadline justifies it — the cost of putting the critical part of the consignment on a flight. On the short Gulf lanes a roll costs days; on North Europe it can cost a fortnight, which is why the two situations are handled with very different urgency.
Selection is sometimes random and sometimes triggered — a classification that does not match the description, a valuation the system flags, a commodity that needs a partner agency to look at it. Our own people attend the examination rather than sending a runner, answer the query with documents on the same day where the papers exist, and tell you immediately what the storage and detention exposure looks like so you can decide how hard to push.
If a consignment lands damaged, the sequence matters more than the outrage. The container is surveyed before it is unpacked, the seal number is checked against the documents, photographs are taken at the point of discovery, and notice goes to the carrier inside the period the rules allow — apparent damage at delivery, hidden damage within three days by sea and fourteen by air. Claims fail on missed notice far more often than they fail on merit.
It is also the honest case for cargo insurance: carrier liability is capped by convention at figures that bear no relation to what most cargo is worth, so an uninsured claim recovers a fraction of the loss even when it succeeds.
Most disputes in freight come from one party assuming a rule the other never agreed to. None of these frameworks are ours — they are the ground the work stands on, and knowing which one applies before the cargo moves is often the difference between a claim that pays and one that does not.
| Framework | What it governs | What it means in practice |
|---|---|---|
| Incoterms 2020 | Where cost and risk pass between seller and buyer | FOB and CIF are ocean terms written for cargo loaded over a ship’s rail; FCA and CIP are the container equivalents most buyers should be using instead. Naming the wrong rule is how insurance gaps happen. |
| Hague-Visby Rules | Ocean carrier liability | Liability is capped at 666.67 SDR per package or 2 SDR per kilo, whichever is higher — almost never the value of the goods. That gap is the argument for marine cargo insurance, not a reason to distrust the carrier. |
| Montreal Convention 1999 | Air carrier liability | Roughly 22 SDR per kilo unless a higher value is declared and paid for at booking. Notice of damage is due within 14 days of receipt and notice of delay within 21 — miss those windows and a good claim dies on a technicality. |
| ISPM 15 | Wood packaging in international trade | Pallets, crates and dunnage must be heat-treated or fumigated and stamped with the treatment mark. Unmarked timber gets a container refused, re-packed or fumigated at the far end, at the shipper’s cost. |
| IMDG Code | Dangerous goods by sea | Sets the classification, packing group, marking, segregation and the signed shipper’s declaration. A carrier confirms the slot only once the declaration agrees with the safety data sheet. |
| IATA DGR | Dangerous goods by air | Tighter quantity limits than sea, packing instructions written per UN number, and shippers who hold current training. Air rejects what sea would have carried, which is worth knowing before the booking. |
Both are full-service. In practice each leans towards the gateways on its doorstep, and a shipment is handled by whichever office is closer to the cargo rather than whichever answered the phone.
Cochin is the home port office and where a large share of the customs filing is done. It covers the Kerala and Tamil Nadu belt — spices, seafood, coir, rubber and engineering goods — and sits beside a port that has become a genuine transhipment option rather than a feeder call. Air cargo through COK and road movement up to the Coimbatore and Tirupur clusters are run from here.
Mumbai is the volume office. Nhava Sheva is an hour away and BOM is the country’s busiest air-cargo gateway, so west-coast ocean bookings, project and heavy-lift planning and most import clearance sit with this team. It also looks after the Gujarat gateways — Mundra and Kandla — where a good deal of chemical, textile and engineering freight actually loads.
The same coordinators described on this page handle your enquiry. Tell us what you are moving and where, and one of them comes back to you — usually within one working day.
Your reference is —. A coordinator will be in touch shortly. Prefer to talk now? Call our team.
Send us the cargo, the origin and destination, and the date you need it there. We will come back with a practical routing and a clear quotation — not a form letter.
May we use analytics and advertising cookies to understand site use and measure campaigns? The site and enquiry forms work if you decline. Cookie policy
