IN PROFILE
Can dry bulk have success without excess? Felipe Simian, CEO of Chilean dry bulk firm Nachipa, on the markets ahead
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ver the last two decades any sustained uptick in dry bulk freight rates has triggered a tsunami of newbuild orders. That was certainly the case when there were spikes in 2007-2008, 2010-2011, and 2013-2014. Will this time be any different? Can the dry bulk sector avoid undermining its opportunity for success? Could 2021 be the next 2006 and come to be seen as the year before the next cycle’s momentum hit its stride? Felipe Simian, CEO of Chilean dry bulk firm Nachipa, is not so sure. “In my experience a lot of the
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people answering, ‘yes’ to those questions are the same people who think we’ve arrived in a ‘new normal’. While I’m inclined to respond positively to those questions, I don’t believe that we’re in a new era,” says Simian, the third generation at the helm of the 73-year-old firm. The complexities of the shipping industry are more visible than they once were, Simian argues, and that’s making a lot more people critically
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analyse the sector in new ways. Simian has been cautiously optimistic about the direction of dry bulk freight rates since early 2018. Rates had bottomed in 2016 after several years of depressed conditions, and given trends in cargo and fleet growth he felt back then that the sector was at the beginning of a sustainable uplift. Unfortunately, two black swans interrupted. First the Brumadinho dam disaster in 2019,
Nobody wants to be the guy who bet the farm on newbuilds powered by the equivalent of Betamax
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maritime ceo
