Shipping giant hands out staff bonuses worth five years of salary

A shipping company that made headlines in 2021 when a giant container ship it was operating became stuck in the Suez Canal is in the news again.

Taiwan-based Evergreen Marine Corporation is handing out staff bonuses equivalent to five years of salary to its 3100 workers, local media reports.

The company will spend $94 million in bonuses after a bumper year in 2022.

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Its mid-year bonus is expected to be 10 to 11 months' worth of workers' 2022 salary.

When it is added to the massive 50-month salary perk they received last December, workers will reap about 60 months, or five years' worth of pay, in bonuses alone.

Evergreen said they will be distributed based on workers' individual performance of workers.

The shipping giant's net profit after tax for the year ending 2022 was $22 billion a year-on-year increase of 39.8 per cent.

The figures are from Evergreen's 2022 financial report, published on March 14.

The whopping profits were thanks to the recovery of the global container shipping industry following the lifting of pandemic lockdowns in many nations, as well as soaring shipping prices, The Straits Times reports.

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In March 2021, the container ship Ever Given, operated by Evergreen, famously ran aground in the Suez Canal, seriously disrupting global shipping.

It was extracted after a massive six-day salvage effort by a flotilla of tugboats.

The blockage disrupted global shipping and world trade.

Hundreds of ships waited in place for the canal to be unblocked, while some ships were forced to take the much longer route around the Cape of Good Hope at Africa's southern tip, requiring additional fuel and other costs.