The global supply-chain crunch has been a disaster for British businesses, says Sam Chambers in The Sunday Times.
But for shipping magnates, such as Gianluigi Aponte of Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC), the world’s biggest shipping company, it has been a bonanza.
Services have been criticized – for years MSC was disparagingly known as “maybe ship comes” – but that hasn’t stopped the shippers charging vastly inflated prices.
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The industry raked in $48.1bn of net profit in a single quarter of 2021, nine times the previous year’s haul.
The sector made almost 50 percent more than the tech titans Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google combined over the same period, while the cost of sending a container rose from Asia to Britain rose from $2,000 to $16,500 in just fifteen months.
Small wonder that, according to Forbes, Aponte’s net worth swelled by $4.4bn to $10.9bn during the pandemic.
Kris Paterson is a writer for WhatJobs.com
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