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Suez Canal says traffic in channel resumes after stranded ship refloated

reuters.com

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Re: Suez Canal says traffic in channel resumes after stranded ship refloated

#181

Post by lisper »

stcredzero wrote: post #178
JosephRedfern wrote: post #62

Lots of articles quote a $XXX billion dollars per day figure, but those numbers are normally for "worth of goods delayed" which, while interesting, doesn't tell the story to me. Are there any estimates as to the actual cost of this "mishap", due to e.g. spoilage, financial/contractual repercussions of late deliveries, personnel/fuel costs?

those numbers are normally for "worth of goods delayed" which, while interesting, doesn't tell the story to me Is it just me, but hasn't the mainstream financial news over the years taken on the feel of reality television? The talking heads are usually pushing some sort of narrative . Occasionally, reality overwhelms their ability to spin things, and they have to readjust and do damage control, as sometimes happens t…

Drama sells better than facts.

Re: Suez Canal says traffic in channel resumes after stranded ship refloated

#182

Post by mwgarcia »

leoh wrote: post #157
exikyut wrote: post #90

Oh hey, they fixed it, - without destroying or imposing significant additional damage to any of the cargo - without destroying or imposing significant additional damage to the ship - without taking multiple weeks - without needing to ship a trillion dollars'+ worth of equipment halfway around the world It's refreshing to see high-end engineering performed so competently.

There appears to be little "high-end engineering." Just a high tide and a bunch of tug boats.

You forgot dredging tons of material. And dredgers have some of the more complex naval engineering out there with all its moving parts.

Re: Suez Canal says traffic in channel resumes after stranded ship refloated

#183

Post by GordonS »

signal11 wrote: post #167
JosephRedfern wrote: post #62

Lots of articles quote a $XXX billion dollars per day figure, but those numbers are normally for "worth of goods delayed" which, while interesting, doesn't tell the story to me. Are there any estimates as to the actual cost of this "mishap", due to e.g. spoilage, financial/contractual repercussions of late deliveries, personnel/fuel costs?

I'd start by computing the number of ships that went around the Southern tip of Africa as a result of the stuck ship. I wonder how much the cost of extra fuel and food/pay for all of those ships doing additional miles will be? And the resulting increase in wholesale/retail costs? Regarding penalties re late delivery, I'm less worried about that. Cargo ships always have language about loss and force majeure. I think a…

Container ships burn horrible, cheap bunker fuel, and the shipping industry is infamous for hiring crew from low-income countries like the Philippines, paying them a pittance, and treating them like modern-day slaves.

I'd strongly suspect that the costs for spoilage and knock-on effects from late delivery etc would outstrip crew and fuel costs by a large margin.

Re: Suez Canal says traffic in channel resumes after stranded ship refloated

#185

Post by mschuster91 »

ufmace wrote: post #141
JosephRedfern wrote: post #62

Lots of articles quote a $XXX billion dollars per day figure, but those numbers are normally for "worth of goods delayed" which, while interesting, doesn't tell the story to me. Are there any estimates as to the actual cost of this "mishap", due to e.g. spoilage, financial/contractual repercussions of late deliveries, personnel/fuel costs?

Probably the actual cost will require an army of accountants and lawyers at a dozen major logistics corporations arguing with each other for months to even try to compute. I doubt us regular uninvolved people will ever get a "real" number. How do you even try to calculate and reveal the cost associated with say a manufacturer in the middle of a supply chain deciding to source their parts from a different vendor for t…

Probably the actual "damage" that was caused will be given by the insurance companies as a sum of claims covered, but there will be a lot of companies that simply have to eat the loss incurred by idling factories and the likes because their supply contracts allow for delivery delays or because pursuing coverage isn't worth the effort (e.g. for those who still had sufficient stock to cover a week of delay and no "real" damage occurred).

A many weeks long shutdown (in case they had to unload the Ever Given) would be many orders of magnitude more expensive.

Re: Suez Canal says traffic in channel resumes after stranded ship refloated

#186

Post by viztor »

JosephRedfern wrote: post #62

Lots of articles quote a $XXX billion dollars per day figure, but those numbers are normally for "worth of goods delayed" which, while interesting, doesn't tell the story to me. Are there any estimates as to the actual cost of this "mishap", due to e.g. spoilage, financial/contractual repercussions of late deliveries, personnel/fuel costs?

I don't think there will be any spoilage, the goods travelled through sea are never fresh.

Re: Suez Canal says traffic in channel resumes after stranded ship refloated

#187

Post by lisper »

chipsambos wrote: post #179
ufmace wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably the actual cost will require an army of accountants and lawyers at a dozen major logistics corporations arguing with each other for months to even try to compute. I doubt us regular uninvolved people will ever get a "real" number. How do you even try to calculate and reveal the cost associated with say a manufacturer in the middle of a supply chain deciding to source their parts from a different vendor for t…

Agree it's incalculable, I don't mean that in the "it's too big of a number" sort of way but in the "we can't possibly know" kind of way: 1) The scale and depth of the disruption makes it impractical to figure in any kind of accurate way and 2) The disruption will have introduced hypotheticals that nay spiral out themselves (butterfly effect style) e.g. some retailer may have lost a customer who went elsewhere, some…

You can get a rough idea by thinking of this as if it were a natural disaster, and from that perspective I think the toll is probably not too bad. No casualties, very little property damage, and a week is not really all that long.

However... that is no excuse to shrug this off. We were very, very lucky that it was only a week. The ship could easily have broken in two, which would have been a catastrophe of the first order and likely shut the canal down for a year. The world dodged a major bullet here.

Re: Suez Canal says traffic in channel resumes after stranded ship refloated

#188

Post by mindslight »

Karunamon wrote: post #39
scrollaway wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever you see such absurdly high numbers attached to cost estimates, always try to understand how they calculate it. This took the "$400 million / hour of shipped goods are being delayed" figure and ran with it by multiplying it, claiming that's the total damage cost. Now ask yourself: Let's say you're sending a parcel via UPS that contains an iphone, or simply $1000 worth of goods. At the last stopping point of t…

Delivery to end customers is not equivalent to delivery as part of a supply chain. Instead of $1K of iPhones, think of it as $1Mn worth of components for a manufacturing process or items to be placed on a shelf. Many of those items' shipping timeframes are well-known and factored into calculations of supply and demand. If a customer wants to buy something from you and you're out of stock, they're generally not going…

You've just gone up a level to draw the boundary at the wrong place. That money isn't "gone", because as you've said, the customer simply buys from a competitor.

This is going to be bad for some individual businesses (imagine a small business buying a whole container of perishable goods), but systemically it's a blip. Delays are not destruction. Failure to make something is not the same as spending resources to make it only to have it destroyed.

Money shifted around to different winners, but very little damage occurred.

Re: Suez Canal says traffic in channel resumes after stranded ship refloated

#189

Post by steve_adams_86 »

IgorPartola wrote: post #130
turing_complete wrote: post #117

Good thing hacker news doesn't run large civil engineering projects.

You know, I used to think that HN was a collection of some of the smartest people on the Internet. Don’t get me wrong, there are some incredible people here. But I guess what I have learned over the past 10 years is that HN has as many blind spots as any other online forum. If you want SV advice, this is the place to be. If you want to dislodge a stuck mega ship, look elsewhere.

The way I look at it is, if I’m here, then there’s a strong statistical probability that a bunch of other clueless superficially intelligent people like me found their way here too. I just hope anyone I encounter is smarter than I am.

Re: Suez Canal says traffic in channel resumes after stranded ship refloated

#190

Post by sharken »

lisper wrote: post #181
stcredzero wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

those numbers are normally for "worth of goods delayed" which, while interesting, doesn't tell the story to me Is it just me, but hasn't the mainstream financial news over the years taken on the feel of reality television? The talking heads are usually pushing some sort of narrative . Occasionally, reality overwhelms their ability to spin things, and they have to readjust and do damage control, as sometimes happens t…

Drama sells better than facts.

I wish it wasn't so, but it is.

Early on it was reported that it could take weeks to reopen the passage, with a cost of billions to the world trade. Now, just one week later it's open again, barely enough time to make the alternate route a good idea.

These rather unrealistic projections seem to have started with the Coronavirus reporting and is an interesting phenomenon in itself.

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