Dalian: After a 31-year history following the regional shipping market diligently, Lloyd's List Maritime Asia, the glossy magazine published by the Swiss-headquartered Informa Group is set to close, according to sources within the organisation.
Originally founded in Singapore in 1978, the magazine moved to Hong Kong in the 1980s and became part of the then Lloyd's of London Press, a forerunner to the Informa Group.
The magazine had seen its frequency reduced from ten times a year to six, before being bundled into parent, Lloyd's List, as a quarterly supplement.
On Friday, a swathe of journalists were made redundant from the newspaper, the world's oldest daily, in further cuts that has seen staffing at the London newsroom of the paper decimated in the past decade. Latest figures show Informa has a net debt of £984.5m.
Commenting on the demise of Maritime Asia, Kevin Chinnery, the magazine's longest serving editor, said: "In the 1980s it grew from a local Singapore magazine into a genuine regional operation, with reporters regularly visiting every corner of the Asia Pacific region. The takeover by Lloyd's of London Press with publisher Nick Elliott in charge of the commercial operation meant that its pioneering continued. The rise of maritime China, the deregulation of port markets, the rise and rise of Singapore and Hong Kong's container ports, the shipbuilding wars between South Korea and Japan, and the massive expansion of Asian fleets and Asian trade in the '80s and '90s were all chronicled in its pages with an insight and passion that journalists based outside the region could never have achieved." Chinnery, who edited the title from 1982 to 1995, lamented, "30 years of building coverage of the region by a string of talented editors and reporters have been lost."
As the sole publication left covering pan-Asian shipping - from Suez to Sakhalin - Seatrade Asia Online, spearheaded by another former Maritime Asia editor with correspondents across the region, will continue to invest in an exciting range of new products for our readers in the coming months. [18/08/09]
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