Comment / Box lines – billions ready to burn in market share fights

ID 90874259 © Iurii Stepanov | Dreamstime.com

It’s Covid time all over again for container shipping, folks?

You bet.

Financially, at least.

Let’s count the billions then, fully aware of hefty margins for an asset-heavy-historically-highly-cyclical segment of the trade, typically characterised by razor-thin profitability that is no more.

All that, steers the conversation to a lack of financial leverage, leading to overcapitalised balance sheets where one billion flows in after another, waiting to be deployed in the next freight rate war* on whatever trade lane.

(*Bar the Transpacific at the moment, the ...