Starting with this one, I shall write in a series of articles to discuss this issue from the experience I gained over the last few years as investor, adviser of startups and simply as someone who is keen in finding wholesome solutions to maritime commerce many problems.

To begin, more often than not, Tech and Maritime don’t see the same problems:

Generally, maritime people grapple with these:

“Dis-aligned” Supply – I made up the word ‘dis-aligned’ to differentiate it from ‘mis-aligned’ which would imply one could do something to align. But, due to ship and space supply in-elasticity, more often than not, supply is ‘dis-aligned’ (difficult if not impossible to adjust) to demand, and unfortunately, it’s usually more over-supply than under-supply.

Low Freight – while this is the very strength of maritime shipping that keeps it thriving vis-a-vis land and air shipping, this creates a hyper-competitive maritime commerce in the 4 markets (New Build, 2nd-hand, Freight, and Demolition). Often, ship-owners and ship-operators run their business below cost, so they have to keep driving cost down.

Timing Good & Bad times – such a competitive nature focuses participants’ energies in timing the limited periods of ‘recovery’ and ‘good times’ in a shipping cycle that faces regular boom and bust.

Opex Control – while ship-operators want to keep their operating cost down, unfortunately, two biggest costs of ship fuel and port expense are mostly out of their control.

Regulatory Changes – furthermore, ship-owners and ship-operators have to deal with regular regulatory changes eg. BWMS, Sulphur2020. These increase their cost of operation and add to many uncertainties they already deal with.

On the other hand, these are what Tech people see:

Lack of data & usage – Tech wants to help, and usually first things first, and that is about digitalising and collecting data. But to their surprise, there are few systematic capture, collection and collation of data, and naturally a very low usage of valuable data.

Inefficiency – Tech finds out that many processes along a very long chain of maritime services are highly inefficient and should be cut to save cost.

Human-Reliant Cost – of these processes, many if not most are carried out still using pens, pencils, fax, phone, etc. (like phone or verbal booking) and manually which are subject to errors, omissions and frauds.

Long Document Chain – lots of paper documents, many copies are required and passed through various nodes and processes, creating problems that maritime service providers are now parts of them.

Maritime and Tech people tend to look pass each other. Sometimes they might even look at the same thing, but see it differently, focusing on their own perspective. In the next article, I will discuss a little more of this mismatch.

This is my small bit in demystifying maritime commerce and innovation, please share this article if you find it helpful. Thank you!

Author’s LinkedIn Profile:

I invest, mentor and grow a group of startups which specialize and focus on creative maritime commerce innovations and solutions via digitalization, data-science applications, work tools, etc.

I believe for now, ShipsFocus’ maritime venture studio model is an appropriate one to most efficiently and effectively overcome the BIG innovation conundrum.