Claus Nehmzov

A former BP and Shazam tech star on what maritime can learn from other industries

Having established itself, the TV show took a new tack on May 21 with the launch of the Maritime CEO Tech Leader Series. Sponsored by the maritime digital platform Dualog, each episode featured interviews with people tasked with changing the face of our industry.

The opening episode of this mini-series took viewers to Singapore with top insights from Claus Nehmzow, the chief innovation officer at Eastern Pacific Shipping.

Before joining Eastern Pacific, Nehmzow drove digital innovation at BP across Asia Pacific, founded a gamified online education start-up, and was COO at music app Shazam.

Nehmzow discussed what he reckoned would be this year’s biggest digital developments in shipping.

“We have almost the perfect storm of different technologies coming together and getting to the point where they can be applied,” he said, citing artificial intelligence, machine learning enabling computer vision and better communications,

all technologies that tend to be pioneered first in the consumer world before transferring to the industrial sector, including shipping.

“Covid-19 is a kind of catalyst. It allows people to discover or rediscover technologies that have been around for a while that now have new emphasis,” Nehmzow said explaining how with the current urgent need for a contactless society digitisation of processes with trusted technologies such as blockchain has developed rapidly in recent months.

Nehmzow also discussed the growth in the use of drones this year as another feature of the contactless society.

PAUL JENNINGS, CEO of the North of England P&I Club and current chairman of the International Group of P&I Clubs joined the Maritime CEO Leader Series on April 28

No club will be immune from the financial fallout brought about by the coronavirus, the North boss conceded in the video interview, but Jennings was adamant that the reserves he and his peers in the International Group had built up in recent years ought to be able to withstand the worst effects brought about by the pandemic. He admonished critics who had been saying for some time that too many clubs had been holding excessive reserves.

On likely changes coming to his sector – and the world of business in general – once the virus recedes, Jennings reckoned there would be less travel and that the path of globalisation might take a new route.

“Do we need to do the amount of travel we did previously?” Jennings mused, adding: “I think it will focus us all on whether we need to jump on that plane for that particular meeting or can we conduct some form of video medium?”

The insurance veteran said that

“We see Covid-19 as an accelerator to make things much faster, to accelerate adoption of technology, to be an impetus for more innovation,” Nehmzow said.

Quizzed about how oil and gas firms differ to shipping in terms of digital adoption, Nehmzow said pointed out the former tend be far larger companies with sizeable analytical and computer science groups embedded in their organisations.

Oil and gas are often very large companies and they have huge analytical and computer science groups mainly driven by the exploration, the upstream.

“You have lots of PhDs doing fantastic stuff and they’re adopting technology at very advanced super quantum levels,” Nehmzow said, adding: “The shipping industry does not have these pockets of highly sophisticated data. This is a huge opportunity for shipping to drive through the data analytics, to monetise data through analytical algorithms.”●

there would likely be more profound debate about where globalisation goes in the coming months.

“What the pandemic around the world has taught everybody is that the just in time world we live in is great when everything works but when you stop the supply chain, my goodness, that does create a problem for everybody,” Jennings said. ●

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