AAL

Boxes as cream on top

AAL Shipping has been making extra cash this year carrying containers on its MPPs

Cypriot national Kyriacos Panayides heads up breakbulk, project cargo and heavylift operator AAL Shipping and has done since 2015, when he moved to Singapore to take over as managing director. But he has worked for Schoeller Holdings - which owns AAL together with Limassol-based Columbia Shipmanagement, as well as various local real estate ventures - for a lot longer and has been involved with AAL since its founding in 1995.

Today AAL operates a core fleet of 25 multipurpose vessels (MPPs) at any given time, and short-term charters more as required, of which it owns 18 units. The average age of AAL’s own vessels is eight years, the company having completed its second major newbuilding plan in 2014.

“We’re now planning for a third generation of newbuildings to be ordered shortly,” he tells Maritime CEO. “We’re currently in discussions with shipyards. We have concluded the design – they will be state-ofthe-art 32,000 dwt heavylift MPPs with combined lifting capacity of 700 tons.”

The MPP market is currently experiencing “record highs” for a number of reasons, he explains. It all started with the soaring container market, which began absorbing MPP vessels to carry the surplus of boxes that the global liner fleet was unable to accommodate because of widescale port delays causing a global capacity crunch, which in turn created a shortage of tonnage supply in the MPP market.

“Then this combined with the fact that a lot of dry cargo from the timber and forest products sector has gone back to breakbulk mode, which when container rates had started to decline had switched to containerization,” he continues, “but have now switched back.”

There’s also been “continuous growth” in the offshore wind industry, he adds, with MPPs used to carry ever-larger turbine blades and towers.

Escalating container demand remains the overriding factor, however, he reiterates, ever since freight rates started to climb. Shippers have become desperate to secure space so have been keen to procure space for containers. In the last six months boxes have therefore been a “complementary” source of revenue for AAL, he says, accounting for 10-15% of its cargoes.

AAL carries containers on deck aboard all its liner and semi-liner services between Asia and Oceania, US and Europe. The fact that most of its vessels are at the larger end of the MPP size spectrum – between 25,000 dwt to 32,000 dwt – means it has the available space to do this quite comfortably, its A Class vessels in particular being purposely designed to serve the liner model with a suitable cargo configuration to ensure maximum cargo intake and segregation.

In addition, the company’s possesses strong in-house engineering expertise across its global network of 12 offices and more than 100 shore staff worldwide thanks to its long history of dealing with heavylift and oversized cargoes.

With no one quite sure how long the current container capacity crunch will continue, it’s a fair bet that AAL’s new third generation of MPP vessels have been designed to carry on doing exactly the same, topping up its traditional diet of breakbulk and heavylift cargoes with containers as the ‘cream’ on top. ●

Spot on AAL

Singapore-based MPP operator, part of Schoeller Holdings, with a fleet of 25 vessels.