Bloomberg's Odd Lots 1 hour podcast Why the Cost of Shipping Goods From China Is Soaring [1] with Marc Levinson, author of The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger [2].
TLDR; [EDIT] Larger and larger shipping container ships resulted in peak capacity just before the 2008 financial crisis. 85% of capacity was consolidated in three main shipping groups. Pandemic demand increased beyond capacity mid 2020 due partly to recovery and consumer disposable income shifting to goods from services impacted by pandemic restrictions. Shippers have increased prices rather than increase capacity.
Is there a parallel between the shipping world building too big and the failure of the A380? Is this a question of total shipping volume or more about hub and spoke models losing to direct models?
So, bufferbloat with ships then causing a denial of service of the port infrastructures. They didn’t talk to the ports if they could handle such giants? I bet the port workers knew that but that information got lost on its powerpointed way up to the management.
It seems more likely that the ports failed to consider the difference between "Can we handle unloading one of those?" and "What if our entire port traffic was nothing but that class of ship?".
There's quite a big difference there and it seems plausible that this could catch them unaware.
They did this with oil tankers in earlier decades before container ships were even a significant thing.
It seems like when you can pay cash for vessels like this and each bigger cycle paid off, a common way to discover what's too big is to go there and find out first hand.
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 25.0 ms ] threadTLDR; [EDIT] Larger and larger shipping container ships resulted in peak capacity just before the 2008 financial crisis. 85% of capacity was consolidated in three main shipping groups. Pandemic demand increased beyond capacity mid 2020 due partly to recovery and consumer disposable income shifting to goods from services impacted by pandemic restrictions. Shippers have increased prices rather than increase capacity.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/2021-01-17/why-the-cost...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Box_(Levinson_book)
Edit: added TL;DR based on podcast at 11m54s.
There's quite a big difference there and it seems plausible that this could catch them unaware.
It seems like when you can pay cash for vessels like this and each bigger cycle paid off, a common way to discover what's too big is to go there and find out first hand.