On Splash’s big birthday, lead columnist Andrew Craig-Bennett gives his take on the past decade.
Ten years ago, the industry that we all love was getting over the 2012 crisis – the year when many of the ships ordered during the 2004-2008 boom caused by China’s accession to the World Trade Organization were delivered. Everything was looking set for return to normal.
Then Splash was launched. Drumroll! Flourish of trumpets! Free shipping news, to a curated standard, on your PC or your smartphone.
At once, the shipping industry embarked on the most volatile, and, take one consideration with another, the most profitable, years that it has ever known.
The Panama Canal (sorry, the America Canal) was improved with wider and deeper locks, and the world did not come to an end.
The Suez Canal was turned in part into a dual carriageway, and the world did not come to an end.
The world came a bit nearer to ending when the covid pandemic broke out, and spread, and spread, and spread. Cruiseships, unable to operate, carried their crews and cabin staff home and laid up, as did lots of other ships – for a while. Then quite suddenly, things turned round, particularly for containerships, as money that could not be spent on holidays and meals out got spent on stuff – lots of stuff, carried in containers. The boxboat business, even down to my tiny part of it, found itself rolling in money. Shipowning enterprises even handed out bonuses to their sea staff.
The dark side of the boom was that ports managed to treat seafarers as if they were all intent on spreading disease wherever they went, and indeed came very close to treating seafarers as if they were not really human at all. The Good Run Ashore had been gone for a while; now ever the minibus to the seamen’s mission building became impossible.
Talking of non-humans at sea, Splash can claim, I think, some credit for the reduction in the horrible trade in live animals for slaughter. That’s one to think on – it’s not quite on the scale of the end of the trade in slaves by sea, but it is a step in the direction of a more humane, more decent, world.
As the demand boom started to ease back to normal, the best friends of the container shipping industry, the Houthis, decided to, in effect, give everyone our favourite thing – a Suez Canal closure. Yippee!
Meanwhile, back at the International Maritime Organization, and in a few other places, our industry started to creep, unwillingly, towards some sort of attempt to stop increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the air, along with sulphur dioxide and soot particles and other stuff.
When I write ‘creep’, I mean it. We are creeping very slowly towards doing a very little about trying to limit anthropogenic global heating. And a lot of creeps think that if they can only apply a few coats of greenwash, in the form of joke sails, or claims that a ship is fitted to burn methane (itself a major cause of anthropogenic global heating) or methanol, because the footings for the tanks were included when the ship was launched, whilst in reality the ship burns HFO for most of the time, and when I say HFO I don’t even mean ULSFO, because a lot of creeps think that washing the sulphur oxides out of the funnel flue gas and dumping them into the sea is absolutely fine as well.
But at least Splash has reported on what is going on.
Our industry doubles in size roughly every fifteen years. Not in the number of ships, or the number of seafarers, but in the ton miles chalked up and thus in the environmental impacts of what we do. A few years ago I was standing with my now grown up children at the view point in Harwich Harbour when I noticed quite a nice looking little containership, as these things go, moving down the harbour and out to sea. A moment later I recognised her as one of the ships that I am involved with in the day job, in fact I know her well, and I reflected that this nice little ship had been, when she was new, one of my employers’ largest and fastest ships. The ships on the trade she was built for are now almost five times her size.
What next?
The United States hogs the headlines now. The US isn’t turning into 1984 or into Brave New World 2; it’s turned into Lord of the Flies. A bunch of early adolescent boys are trying to run the place, and not doing it well.
Merchant shipping moves 80% of world trade.In money terms, the United States accounts for a quarter of world trade, but the US only accounts for 11% of world imports. The gap between those numbers, which I took from Richard Baldwin of the IMD Business School in Lausanne, though I could have looked them up for myself, tells us that the US also exports quite a lot and we can also conclude that a good deal of US trade is in what we used to call invisibles – they are called that because they do not generate Customs forms and are thus invisible to governments, and of course they don’t bother us. We like stuff that we can walk up to and pat, in the words of the late Sir Adrian Swire, a former employer and no mean shipowner, when he was asked why he owned ships and an airline but not a bank.
Still, 11% is quite a lot. Let’s assume that President Trump imposes tariffs in all directions – what happens to our business, the international carriage of goods by sea?
Probably, not a lot, unless and until Mr. Trump manages to crash the US economy. Stuff moving by sea finds other routes. If those other routes are longer, that’s more ton miles. Good for us!
