Charter Planes and Bidding Wars: How Bitcoin Miners Raced to Beat Trump’s Tariffs
For companies that import goods from Southeast Asia, such as Luxor, the moment of Trump’s announcement was particularly useless, coinciding with Eid, the holiday celebrated at the end of Ramadan. Initially, Luxor’s attempts to organize the collection remained unanswered. In some cases, says Berschel, “factories had truck lines in front of them.” But finally, in the light of circumstances, the warehouse agreed to prepare the material shipment.
“We had to call a lot of people on the side of the supply chain to allow us to resume,” explains Lin. Organizing a collection a few days old, in the middle of a public holiday, would be normally “almost impossible”, she said. “It never happened before this news broke.”
On April 3, Luxor began bouncing for a charter plane for the order of $ 12 million, which was large enough to fill a throw. Lin installed the camp at the customer office, so that it can directly relay the messages of the transfer of freight, which negotiated with air carriers.
As the day progressed, the quotes from charter aircraft continued to increase. Whenever Luxor’s customer has submitted an offer, another part came above and the negotiation cycle started again. “We had a very short window to make a decision. I do not think that it is the standard to need to make a decision of several million dollars in a window so shortly, ”explains Lin.
At midnight, Lin had resolved a final offer of 1.76 million dollars, she said. But in the morning of April 4, she said, the offer had been gas suits-prices had reached $ 3.5 million. According to Seedion Cargo, the prices of certain types of air freight culminated at 10 times the regular rate in the first week of April.
Louxor and his client have given up on the plan to charter an airplane.
Meanwhile, in the cargo terminals of certain major airports in Southeast Asia, things had started to collapse.
“It was absolute chaos,” said Berschel, who went to Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore to monitor the progress of expeditions. “There was so much cargo to the terminals, to obtain freight through the terminals, through X-ray scanners, and next to the plane was a challenge in itself,” he said.
At Suvarnabhumi Airport in Bangkok, remembers Berschel, the accumulation of pallets had created a logjam. With few available platform space, the truckers transported boxes from their vehicles to the airport terminal. Police were on site to control the swollen crowds. “It was a bit like a concert, but a concert for freight,” explains Berschel.
In the disorder, even the importers who had managed to guarantee the passage of the starting planes risked missing the opportunity to load their cargo while they were fighting to exceed the logjam of the plane. “The possibility of missing an airplane, to miss a loading window,” explains Berschel. “There were so many situations where we were in literally minutes.”
Thailand airports, which manage Suvarnabhumi airport, did not respond to a request for comments.
On April 8, Vlad Siniavsky was seated in his office in Montreal while waiting for the arrival of his last pieces of freight and calculating how much money he had lost. Siniavsky is the founder of Asicxchange, another trading company of Bitcoin mine material captured in the price wheelbarrow.
