I spy your entire fleet

Ship-tracking, monitoring commodity prices and commercial information touch shipping's jugular

By Ryan Skinner (email)

BIMCO recently wrote an alarmingly insightful blurb about an alarmingly innocuous meeting. Reporting on the recent meeting of IALA in South Africa, BIMCO waxes futuristic on the potentials and risks in AIS and other tracking technologies.

"But even more interesting are the possibilities of AIS through satellite surveillance with, not too far down the line, the ability to obtain a global picture of shipping all over the world, in more or less real time."

Lloyd's List Intelligence, for all its packaging faults, has tried to tie the AIS picture into the ship chartering picture. That is, they offer two basic services that make sense seen together: AIS services and ship fixtures data. It is reasonably easy to establish the revenue of a given transit, even if you aren't privy to the commercial details of a charter contract.

Of course, these calculations get more and more valuable the more data that comes in. Once you've analyzed one ship's operating profile over 100 voyages, you have an excellent foundation for assessing its profitability compared to a benchmark. You could even establish a speed profile under given conditions, so that you could assess its load (cargo in tonnes) based on its progress.

For infornographers (information pornographers), the possibilities are tremendous. You could simply query an entire shipping company's fleet and have a pretty strong understanding of its value, its overall operating efficiency and its profit potential given certain market developments.

As such, analysts have access to the throbbing heart of shipping operations. Then, they take their chances. After all, a market is a market.

Comments

[Neville]

Ryan, I think we can forget about LLi for the most part. What will happen in the long term is that monitoring will be in place for ships in Seca Zones, choke points and even deepsea for regulatory purposes. In the short term, the real question is not dollars per day or per box - it's why charterers aren't already demanding monitoring as a clause in CPs. After all when a shipowner beats his ETA to the discharge port by a day then sits below the horizon cleaning his turbo at the charterer's expense you have to ask if things couldn't be a little more transparent...