While conceding that Singapore had been the top location in the past, Anglo-Eastern Ship Management ceo Peter Cremers said: "In Singapore, ship management is not ideal going forward."
Speaking at the company's annual lunch briefing, he said the two biggest factors working against the city-state now were the tremendous appreciation of the Singapore dollar against the US dollar and the sharp rise in costs. Other factors include difficulty in finding suitable staff.
The main difference that pushed Singapore ahead in the shipping industry game was the extremely proactive attitude of the Singapore government in attracting industry players to set up shop there. Like almost everything else in the famously disciplined country, there was a planned, concerted effort to develop the maritime cluster and it worked.
Within a decade or so, Singapore managed to develop itself as an international maritime centre through the time-tested method of tax incentives, which seem to have worked for every other industry they wanted to develop in the past. The intrepid few came at first and then a wider range of people and companies started flowing in and a critical mass developed.
The government meanwhile continues to be proactive, going as far as to visit companies in Hong Kong with offers of help in setting up and incentives in the hope of poaching them. Most ship management top executives in the city would have a glowing tale of the professionalism and persistence of these officers in seeking to attract them to Singapore.
There is an almost fateful resignation that with its equally famous laissez-faire attitude towards business, Hong Kong has taken its eye off the ball in the interim and lost out. "Singapore has its inertia and it's going to be difficult to change that; once there is a cluster somewhere, as it is in Singapore, it's hard to change that," Cremers said.
"The bureaucracy in Singapore is much more responsive than Hong Kong," Cremers added. He conceded that the general conclusion among the shipping community was that they should not aim for the wholesale winning back of the business but target specific niches, perhaps such as ship management, where they have an edge.
However despite this Cremers still maintains that Hong Kong is the best place to do business for him. Apart from the US dollar currency peg, which is a big advantage to ship management companies whose revenues are all in US dollars, other factors cited include ease of finding qualified staff, either locally or as expatriates that can be easily brought in.
Despite the best efforts of the Singapore government machinery to plug this gap apparently the requirements of ship managers are not being met. And the staffing issues may not get better going by recent accounts of anti-foreign worker sentiment. There have been reports of increased vetting of skilled foreign worker hirings which may hit the ship management sector, where there is a higher proportion of jobs that employers find it difficult to find locals to fill.
Singapore certainly seems to hold a pretty good hand at the moment, but from the perhaps less reported sentiments being expressed, should not be too confident that others do not have an ace in the hole somewhere.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. Seatrade, a trading name of Informa Markets (UK) Limited. Add Seatrade Maritime News to your Google News feed.
