LONDON (Reuters Breakingviews) - The blockage of the Suez Canal comes a year too late for shipping giants. Assuming the massive Ever Given container vessel remains beached across the channel, Moller-Maersk and others will soon have to re-route via South Africa, adding time and fuel costs. A year ago, with crude prices in free-fall, many did that anyway. The oil price recovery makes the choice more painful. The Egyptian government’s transit fees for the 120-mile (193-kilometre) channel are calibrated against the cost of taking the alternative route round Africa. To shipping companies, it’s worth it to shave seven days off the journey from Asia to Europe. Given just-in-time global supply chains, many can charge clients a premium for speedy delivery. However, when crude prices deviate too far from Cairo’s financial model, as they did in March 2020, that relationship breaks down. With bunker prices plunging as low as $250 per tonne in April, a third of their level at the start of the year, many operators opted to give a wide berth to Suez’s transit fees, which work out at roughly $320,000 for the average container ship, based on the 50 ships that typically pass through the canal a day and the nearly $6 billion in fees that the Egyptian government raked in in 2019. Ever Given has left shipping operators with a headache. With bunker prices back above $500 a tonne, the extra week round the Cape of Good Hope will cost $350,000 in fuel alone, assuming rough consumption of 100 tonnes per day. On top of that come wages, insurance and other overheads including, presumably, penalties for late delivery. Despite Covid-19’s disruptions to global trade, 2020’s rock-bottom fuel prices contributed to a bumper year for shipping companies. Maersk’s 2020 EBITDA jumped 44% to $8.2 billion, boosting its valuation by the same amount over the year. The $42 billion company’s shares are now down 8% since the Ever Given ran aground. Chief Executive Soren Skou must be cursing that it didn’t do so 12 months ago.