For companies that import goods from the South -East Asia, like Luxor, the times of Trump’s announcement have been particularly useless, coinciding with Eid, the holiday day celebrated at the end of Ramadan. Initially, Luxor attempts to organize the collection remained unanswered. In some cases, Berschel says, “the factories had truck lines in front of them”. But in the end, in the light of the circumstances, the warehouse agreed to prepare the hardware expedition.
“We had to call many people on the side of the supply chain to allow us to collect,” says Lin. Organizing a collection at a few days of notice, in the middle of a public holiday, would normally be “almost impossible”, he says. “It never happened before this news broke.”
On April 3, Luxor started making an offer for a charter plane for the order of $ 12 million, which was large enough to fill a jet. Lin established the field at the Customer’s Office, so that he could directly forward the messages from the lawyer, who was negotiating with the air carriers.
With the progress of the day, the quotes for Charter planes continued to climb. Every time the Luxor customer presented an offer, another part came exaggerated and the negotiation cycle started. “We had a very short window to make a decision. I don’t think it is the rule needed to make such a multimilionary decision in such a short time window,” says Lin.
At midnight, Lin had solved a final offer of $ 1.76 million, he says. But on the morning of April 4, he claims that the offer had been trampled: the prices had risen to $ 3.5 million. According to Sealione Cargo, the prices for some types of air transport have reached the peak 10 times the regular rate in the first week of April.
Luxor and his client have given up the plan to rent a plane.
In the meantime, to the loading terminals of some important airports in the South -East Asia, things had started to reveal.
“It was an absolute chaos,” says Berschel, who traveled to Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore to monitor the progress of shipments. “There was so much load to the terminals, to actually obtain goods through the terminals, through the X -ray scanners, and alongside the plane it was a challenge in itself,” he says.
At the Suvarnabhumi airport in Bangkok, Berschel recalls, the accumulation of pallet had created a Logjam. With little space to the available dock, truck drivers were transporting boxes from their vehicles to the airport terminal. Police officers were available to control the swollen crowd. “It was a bit like a concert, but a concert for the load,” says Berschel.
In the disorder, even the importers who had managed to guarantee the passage to the departure planes risked losing the opportunity to load their load as they struggled to overcome the logjam on the aircraft. “The possibility of losing a plane, a load window is missing,” says Berschel. “There were so many situations in which we were down for the minutes literally.”
The airports of Thailand, who manage Suvarnabhumi airport, did not respond to a commentary request.
On April 8, Vlad Siniavsky sat in his office in Montreal waiting for the arrival of his latest pieces of load and calculating how much money he had lost. Siniavsky is the founder of Asicxchange, another Bitcoin mining hardware trading company captured in the tariff scramble.