#1 - Maritime Branch Analysis
Some products incur annual expenses for the shipowner. For example, some safety equipment is required to have a service check each year. The price of the service check can vary from year to year, which makes it difficult to plan the budget. Therefore some shipowners demand solutions that offer fixed rates or annual fees for products that they know require some kind of regular service check or maintenance. Today many shipowners have chosen to reduce the fuel consumption by reducing the cruising speed – this is called “slow steaming”, which is an ongoing trade-off between time and money. As shipping prices have been reduced because of overcapacity in the world fleet, the need for shipowners to plan ahead to cut costs has increased. It becomes increasingly important to 76
comply with the time schedule to keep the fuel cost down. If the ship is forced to speed up to compensate for delays it reduces the shipowner’s profit. Retrofit solutions are becoming increasingly common today, due to regulations as well as system optimisation and cost reduction opportunities. However, many retrofit solutions require that the ship is in dock. As a ship is very seldom docked to merely install a retrofit solution, this needs to be planned in accordance with, for example, 1- or 5-year checks. As a docking is extremely busy a retrofit needs to be coordinated with many other operations on-board the ship, on a very limited time schedule. In such a docking, the main cost driver is usually the ship’s downtime – not the cost of components, labour etc.
Keeping/Increasing uptime Major breakdowns that stop or delay the ship are extremely costly. Shipowners want the highest possible uptime of the products and systems that are crucial for the operation of the ship. They are interested in guarantees that ensure a certain percentage of uptime. These demands can require alterations of the product, system or service in terms of sensors, monitoring systems. A reduction of ship crews has been seen for many years, but this has now reached a current minimum. There are many shipowners that further reduce the cost of crew by hiring cheaper, but often less qualified crew. This increases the requirements for the systems and components - and also opens opportunities for the supply of service.