It gives summer bonuses with an average of 30 monthly salaries

Shipping rates have skyrocketed during the pandemic. Sometimes it costs over $20,000 to send a container from Asia to the American West Coast – as opposed to almost $1,200 due to very high demand. Now the situation has reversed. Rising interest rates and inflation tighten their grip on consumers.

Prices have come down to normal levels, but many shipping companies have entered into long term agreements which means they have made very good profits until recently.

record profit

Taiwanese shipping company Yang Ming Marine gives employees an average of 30 salaries per month as a summer bonus in connection with the June payout. This comes on top of the 12 months pay bonus awarded earlier this year.

According to the Taiwanese Business Economic Daily, the company’s articles of association state that at least one percent of last year’s profits must go to employees in the form of bonus. The bonus payment was recently approved by the shipping company’s general meeting.

With an average monthly salary of just over NT$50,000 (around NOK 20,000), this will pay out a bonus of around NOK 600,000, according to Focus Taiwan.

The company’s shareholders also get a share of the record earnings. Approximately 40 percent of the profits are distributed to the shareholders of the shipping company.

The company’s share price has increased more than 30-fold during the pandemic. The share price is down, but it’s ten times higher than it was three years ago. The container shipping boom is over. The company expects this year’s profits to decline by 99 percent compared to last year.

The shipping industry is suffering

Shipping giant Evergreen Marine Corp., whose 3,100 permanent employees have a higher fixed salary than rival Yang Ming Marine, offered an average of 50 monthly salaries in annual bonuses in the new year. This came after the shipping company made a profit of NT$334 billion (Kroner 120 billion) last year.

Last week, employees were paid an average of 11 to 12 months as a summer bonus. According to Taiwan News, this would mean an average payout of around NT$613,000 (about NOK 220,000).

Evergreen warned that this year’s earnings will drop 94 percent.

– The shipping industry will suffer in the first half of the year, but then it will start to recover again. Any increase will be possible only in the second half of the year. The key to this happening depends on when the war between Russia and Ukraine ends, Evergreen CEO Hsieh Huey-chuan said during the public meeting in May.

Shipping rates collapse

Several shipping lines reported losses in their quarterly reports for the first three months of the year. Analytics firm Xeneta recently described the market situation as a “collapse”. a report The largest drop the company recorded in May was on the Xenetas Freight Index (XSI).

If industry watchers wondered how bad shipping companies could get after the 10 percent drop in April, the answer is now available. This is the largest drop we’ve ever seen for the XSI Index, which tracks global prices in real time. It paints a bleak picture of the situation in the industry, says Patrick Berglund, director of the Oslo company, which collects and analyzes freight rates, in the report.(conditions)Copyright Dagens Næringsliv AS and/or our suppliers. We’d like you to share our statuses using links that lead directly to our pages. Reproduction or other use of all or part of the Content may be made only with written permission or as permitted by law. For more terms see here.