Most of them will be fine, but probably a couple will consolidate or collapse. They'll start to delay or cancel new ships because who knows how long this will last, and we'll probably end up in an other crisis eventually if they all cut back too much.
> Putting the fifth-largest ocean carrier’s earnings into context, [their profit for the first three quarters of 2021 exceeded] its return from the whole of the past five years.
With all due respect, that appears to be cherry-picking. Why focus on the 5th largest company exclusively? Did the top 4 not have huge profit growth and fit comfortably into your narrative?
There's also the accounting profits that may occur due to something other than simple operations, for example, if the company bought long-term fuel futures, they may have been taking an accounting loss every quarter until oil prices blew up, and now that same contract, a result of financial engineering, delivers massive profit all at once.
Seems the gains were short-lived, according to the linked report ("shipping profiteers", yea no narrative there), the market caps from the report (sourced April 1, 2022) vs today, from the same web site. Just 13 months later, most down by about 50%:
It was the first article I found that specifically referred to profit numbers during peak pandemic. The shipping industry being quite fungible, there was really no need to continue digging given the point I was refuting.
If you were interested in the answer to your question about the top 4 companies and my “narrative”. You could have quite easily found that information yourself.
Every day the container ship is sitting outside port waiting to offload is a day it is not shipping goods, and I'm guessing a large container ship is a fairly expensive asset with a limited lifespan.
