Will be interesting to see it's effect.
just heard that a 40ft shipping container from China to Australia had gone up from $1400 to $8000 in recent times. Someone will have to cover the costs.

Same in the Uk, pre pandemic, China to UK was around ?2000, now it's around ?20,000. Shipping companies reckon containers were/are in demand for PPE creating a container backlog/shortage. Cost may reduce in the future, but suspect it may never return to pre pandemic prices.

..and sitting in limbo for a month before unloading adds to prices...

To put some numbers around this, lets say roughly a shipping container is 12m x 2.3m x 2.3m internally. Should mean you can probably get say 5 boards deep, 3 boards wide x 5 boards high so, conservatively you would fit 75 boards in a container?

Pre-covid thats <$20/board freight, now its just under $110/board. So lets say worst case $100/board increase. Boards are probably the worst $/volume ratio, would expect things like masts, extensions would be much less affected.

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mark62 said..
Cost may reduce in the future, but suspect it may never return to pre pandemic prices.

Supply and demand. The price of containers and the cost on ships is brokered. Unless there are significantly less container ships / containers now compared to say 4 years ago supply will eventually catch up with demand again and prices will go down.

From what I have heard the biggest problem at the moment is a lot of containers sitting empty in countries other than China. In some cases empty containers being shipped to China just to provide enough supply.

I suspect the trade wars between the US and China the last couple of years didn't help.

I heard on the news yesterday that the prices of shipping (to the UK) are falling back. Good news. In the UK there are loads of full containers clogging up our ports as we dont have enough HGV drivers to shift them onwards. Large shipping companies were diverting ships from Felixstowe to Rotterdam. I guess it will take a while longer for things to return to normal.

I was told for US container cost went from $3500 to $15000.