Today, the Asian shipowners represent almost half of the world fleet with great potential. The Asian trade, fleet, seafarers and financing capital are now all very important
elements of the international shipping industry, writes Wayne Wei Zhuang, BIMCO’s Regional Manager of Asia while discussing about the future of Asia’s ship financing scene in an article published in the BIMCO website.
Technology and regulation are clearly the drivers for the future shipping industry. And, to be honest, Asia seems not to be at the forefront of those key areas, at least for the time being. Nevertheless, the Asian capitals are full of buzzworthy developments.
Take note of finance and tech
Notably, China is bridging the gap as western shipping investments are taking a downturn. The forecast is that the Chinese policy banks and lessors will keep the momentum to
pour more capital into the shipping community.
Why? China simply has too much “hot money” within China where they need to invest abroad and would like to support the Chinese yards, and secondly, Chinese financial
packages are too attractive to ignore by many shipowners.
The Chinese fleet also needs to be upgraded amid stricter maritime regulation such as domestic emission control area. This may not be good news to the shipping industry where we are suffering from overcapacity.
If we look at the roadmap for China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), and taking the impressive ships and ports’ asset investment into account, it is not hard to predict the BRI will impact the shipping world from Asia and across the world.
Small Impacts Already Showing
For instance, we see a small chunk of containers now are carried by train to the Europe instead of conventional sea-borne carriage, and the Yamal LNG projects, the Sino-Burmese pipelines and other BRI related projects is impacting – and will impact – the energy shipping lanes.
Shipping Innovation in Asia
For 2020, we are excited to see that many cutting-edge technologies are being experimented with in the Asian shipping industry, particularly, in Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Shanghai.
With sound research and development funding, as well as abundant talents, Asia is very likely to take off in terms of shipping innovation.
BIMCO and Asia in 2020
In 2020, we are committed to spreading our successful BIMCO Asia Advisory Panel (BAAP) from Singapore and Hong Kong to other Asian maritime clusters, such as Shanghai and Tokyo.
We will focus on dedicated roadshows and seminars at different cities in Asia to ensure a productive interaction with our members, in favour of being present at all the major maritime conferences.
When it comes to the very topical maritime regulations, we will try to organise different web-meetings to share our thinking and practical advice. I’ve been pleased to see that more projects are initiated and led by our Asian members.
For instance, the LNG purchase contract for fuel project and Ship Sale and Leaseback project are long-awaited in 2020. BIMCO hopes to continue that trend.
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Source: BIMCO
