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Collaboration is taking a leap of faith for future opportunities

Photo: Marcus Hand decarbonisation-panel-SMW.jpg
Collaboration has become the watchword when it comes to decarbonisation but its benefit can be put at risk if the individual parties are focused on what is in it for them.
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Speaking on the CEO panel at the Accelerating Decarbonisation session in Singapore Maritime Week, Christian Ingerslev, CEO of Maersk Tankers, noted the word that is heard most on such panels was ‘collaboration’ but raised the question of what it really meant.

Ingerslev said that to Maersk Tankers collaboration was doing three things all of which related to scale.

“In some situations, we as a company have the right people to drive scale, and to drive the agenda. In other situations, we're the right people to participate in scale. And in some situations where the right people to use our voice, to raise issues are of concern to the industry,” he explained.

However, individual parties cannot go into collaboration with a specific goal of gaining something for their company.

“I think the biggest risk of collaboration is that everybody sits down and wonders ‘what do I get out of it?’. But the reality is that there's so many business opportunities and decompensation that you need to not worry about that. Collaboration is taking that leap of faith, stepping forward, and not worrying about what happens to you today, but seeing those opportunities that are there in the future.”

Ingerslev said that Maersk Tankers as a private company owned by the AP Moller Foundation is the fortunate position of not being judged on the last quarter in the way that a public company might be, and instead the question it was how to stay relevant for the next 50 years.

With collaboration also comes the sharing of data to create the scale required something which Ingerslev noted there was a reluctance to do. With some 10,000 tankers in the world and the average shipowner owning just 3.8 tankers, he said, “I’m sorry to say each of our company’s individual data is worthless unless we pull it together. It feels a bit like each individual saying I will not shop on Amazon because then they will get my data.