Speaking at seminar of shipping trends and port cities in Singapore, Stopford, president of Clarksons Research Services (CRS) said, what he described as the “mechanisation” of shipping, over the last 50 years was “running out of steam”.
Much of this mechinsation has revolved around building larger, standardised vessels. However, Stopford noted that savings were much higher in percentage terms at the bottom end of this scale than the top where we are today.
For example increasing a 35,000 dwt bulker by 5,000 dwt results in a unit cost saving of 12.5%, by the time you increase a 140,000 dwt ship by 5,000 dwt savings are just 2% and for 170,000 dwt bulker only 1.5%.
“Now while its good to save 1.5% this is a lot of work and investment, and loss of flexibility from a port point of view,” Stopford said.
“These big ships are not saving us much money, you save much more by getting a 35,000 tonne cargo into 40,000 tonne ship, at the bottom of the scale, than you do at the bigger end of the scale.”
The last few years have seen building of the world’s largest ever bulkers Vale’s 400,000 dwt valexmax and, and the biggest containerships the 18,000 teu Triple-E for Maersk Line, which are set to be trumped by 19,000 teu capacity vessels from China Shipping.
“I think even Maersk realizes the whole thing has peaked out now and we’re at the end of an era, and they’ve struggled with the Triple E’s,” Stopford said.
With mechanisation “running out of steam” he said the next area of “unexploited technology” was the information revolution.
“I think tomorrow’s globalization is about smart ships, smart operations, smart technicians.” How this would be achieved linking together elements such as onboard sensors, cloud computing and 4G communications is the difficult part though. “You really need the Steve Jobs of the industry to interpret it,” he said.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. Seatrade, a trading name of Informa Markets (UK) Limited. Add Seatrade Maritime News to your Google News feed.
