Shipping groups awash with post-Covid cash.

 

In just three years, the container shipping industry will have made as much money as the entire previous six decades, according to a report in The Financial Times. 

 

Propelled by soaring demand following the pandemic, shipping groups have enjoyed a level of unparalleled profitability. 

 

Shipping research firm Drewry estimates that the entire industry made an operating profit of just US$7bn in 2019, and US$26bn in 2020. But in 2021, as companies paid ever higher rates to get the goods they needed, operating profits jumped to US$210bn and are forecast to reach US$270bn this year.

 

Container shipping groups from Mediterranean Shipping Company and AP Møller Maersk to CMA CGM and Hapag-Lloyd have experienced a “once in a lifetime” market boom, the FT noted. 

 

“Earning the money they have done in the past two years is intoxicating,” Simon Heaney, a senior manager at Drewry, said. 

 

Drewry forecasts the industry’s profits for 2021-23 will equal the amount it made between the 1950s, when container ships were first built, and 2020. “It’s something you see once in a lifetime, maybe not even that,” Rolf Habben Jansen, chief executive of Germany’s Hapag-Lloyd, the German carrier that is the industry’s fifth-largest by capacity, said.

 

But the container shipping cycle appears to have peaked. 

 

Port congestion worldwide is still high, which has forced up prices.