The Inside Story of the Ship That Broke Global Trade

The six-day stranding of the Ever Given in the Suez Canal last March did something incredibly rare: it made regular people care about shipping, the means by which more than 80% of the world’s goods are transported.
It took only one wrong turn for the container ship to bring a critical trading artery to a standstill. This is how a $1 billion worth of cargo got stuck, freed and impounded as the courts took over.
Ever Given is one of the largest container ships in the world. The ship is owned by Shoei Kisen Kaisha (a ship owning and leasing subsidiary of the large Japanese shipbuilding company Imabari Shipbuilding), and is time chartered and operated by container transportation and shipping company Evergreen Marine, headquartered in Luzhu, Taoyuan, Taiwan.