Business · Markets
The freight boom is over. Nobody told the ports
Cranes ordered at the peak are arriving into a market that no longer needs them, and the bill is now due.
Cranes ordered at the peak are arriving into a market that no longer needs them, and the bill is now due.
The crane arrived in March, on a ship built to carry cranes, and it took nine days to raise. It cost eleven million euros, it can lift a forty-foot container in under ninety seconds, and it has moved forty-one boxes since it was switched on.
It was ordered in 2022, when the queue of ships outside this port was visible from space.
The lag that eats ports
A crane takes three years from order to operation. A shipping boom lasts eighteen months. Every port authority in Europe knows both of those numbers, and every one of them ordered anyway, because the alternative was watching the traffic go to the port down the coast.
We did not buy a crane. We bought an option on a boom that was already over when we signed.
Who pays
The debt is public, the volumes are private, and the difference between them will be settled in the next municipal budget — a document that does not, anywhere in its four hundred pages, use the word crane.