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Through 2020, shipping companies were selling their older boats for scrap as global demand for non-essential goods crashed.
Now, with a global recovery accelerating, orders for 208 container ships with a total value of $1.3 billion have been placed this year, compared to 120 worth $8.8 billion last year and 114 valued at $6.9 billion in 2019, VesselsValue said.
“It’s been our busiest period in years,” an executive with South Korea’s Hyundai Heavy Industries, the world’s largest ship-building yard, told the WSJ.
“We are almost out of slots to build new ships until late 2023,” he said.
Demand is so great that some builders are no longer accepting new orders, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Instead, the shipyards are working to renegotiate prices for existing orders as the cost of steel plate used to build the ships has doubled this year, industry insiders told the WSJ.
TREND FORECAST: We note this article to analyze whether or not inflation is temporary. Indeed, if it is temporary as the central Banksters declare, then the world’s largest shipping giants are way off-trend, since they would not be spending billions building more container vessels to ship industrial and consumer goods.