The economics of container shipping were fundamentally different. The huge sums borrowed to buy ships, containers, and chassis required regular payments of interest and principal. State-of-the-art container terminals meant either debt service, if a ship line had borrowed to build its own terminal, or rent, if the terminal was leased from a port agency. Those fixed costs accounted for up to three-quarters of the total cost of running a container operation, and they had to be paid no matter how much cargo was available.
