Cold winds and tough times
Last week’s DigitalShip Hamburg conference was a living testament to the troubles that are threatening to wash away many shipping companies. Registration was strong but attendance was a little lower than previous years. Ask anyone about that and they would reply ‘these guys have other things to worry about’.
They are right. The insolvency of three single-ship KG companies associated with Hamburg’s Vega Reederei the same week underlined the fact that the German shipping market and the finance system that supports it are under serious threat.
The picture is the same globally, though owners have managed to defer the worst effects by burning through the cash piles amassed pre-2008 and because the banks (another group with rather bigger things on their mind) haven’t moved to repossess because interest rates have been so low.
That is changing and satellite communications may not escape unscathed as the market tightens. For a SOLAS universe of either 40,000 or perhaps closer to 70,000 merchant ships, there are at least three MSS airtime providers, dozens of DPs and SPs and rivals from FSS who moved into maritime a few years ago.
As Marlink’s Knut Natvig mentioned in his first-day introduction, the SP is the glue between the airtime provider and the customer – they have the crucial role of getting pricing right and adding value.
Now, the usual suspects will already be saying that Inmarsat is doing a pretty good job of putting smaller SPs out of business by raising PAYG prices, but looked at dispassionately, something will have to change.
Indeed, it has already changed. An SP of my acquaintance is fond of remarking that selling airtime may have been the past but certainly won’t be the future. When an OEM or a software vendor can also be an airtime provider, the fight gets too tough for many.
This will force the SPs to get better at what they already do – squeezing value out of L-Band even while they decide whether to take the bigger bet on Ku or Ka-band VSAT. And if rumours going around Hamburg that one big and well-known SP is indeed up for sale are correct, the evidence is that change is already observable.
And if the market pre-GX was tough, the market after could be tougher still. As DPs, SPs and OEMs sign up to the SEP and GX and accept everything that goes with that, the mid-size players, or simply those not fleet enough of foot, will be left to scrap it out even as the big boys pull further away.
For the Marlinks of this world, that may be less of a problem as they are hedged across all the products as are others, so customers can order a la carte or table d’hôte.
It was said once again in Hamburg that the IT department needs to get out from behind their desks and understand more clearly what is happening in chartering and operations.
As Pietro Amorusi of D’Amico noted, “Shipowners don’t want to take care of solutions, they want to forget about problems. When you go to buy a drill, what you really need is a hole – this should be the approach.”
And that goes the other way. DPs and SPs should be on their customers like glue, talking about the future, describing scenarios and laying out options.
They will still have a hard job. Inmarsat’s direct sales strategy is increasing pricing pressure but the other DPs and SPs are at it too. Inmarsat Maritime President Frank Coles told the audience he expected some kind of consolidation over the next couple of years and that he didn’t think there would be any ‘unlimited’ bandwidth packages on offer in maritime in future if demand continued to increase.
Zeev Steinluaf from Station711 said he could see the day when the majority of crew access was free at point of use, either subsidised by the owner, the DP/SP or supported by advertising.
So the trick of it, just as in the shipping piece itself, is relationships. What the L-Band DPs and SPs have that the VSAT vendors don’t by and large is the relationships – in some cases built up over years. The VSAT vendors can talk service speed and capacity, but you wonder sometimes if they are as close to the market as they claim.
Still, another DS done and we have reasonable clarity on what we might expect over the next year and into 2014 by which time we will have a first glimpse of what GX might be capable of. All shipowners and managers have to do know is call with great accuracy the timing and extent of the market’s recovery in their particular sector and we are home and dry…