Japan’s Marubeni and Norway’s Klaveness have set up a jointly owned pool management company, Maruklav Management, to combine the MG Harrison Shipping and Baumarine panamax bulker pools. The news follows quickly on from other pool announcements in the aframax trades.
The partnership will commence early April with a fleet of 30 vessels, and the companies say that data insights and analytics will be a main driver for decision making and positioning of the vessels.
Daily management of the pool will be run out of Klaveness offices in Oslo, Dubai and Singapore, and will be strengthened by executives from the existing Marubeni pool operations.
Michael Jørgensen has been appointed managing director, and Masashi Kobayashi deputy managing director.
Takeshi Hisatomi, general manager of Marubeni Corporation, commented: “Our two organisations are fully committed to provide the best service for all pool participants. Every participant will not only benefit from improved earnings and market insights but will also have a manager taking care of their vessels for strong asset preservation over years of employment through the safe hands of our joint operations teams.”
Lasse Kristoffersen, president and CEO of Klaveness, added: “We have been looking for a partner on our pool business and we believe we have found a perfect match in Marubeni. We share the same views on the business and not least the same values on how to run a company. Together we will grow and develop this business beyond what each one of us could do on our own.”
Commenting via LinkedIn on today’s news, Dr Roar Adland, shipping professor at the Norwegian School of Economics, wrote: “Shipping pools used to be so…1980s… Now, the past couple of weeks have brought news of Signal Maritime’s ‘takeover’ of commercial management for the Heidmar tanker pools, and today Klaveness and Marubeni tying the knot to form the biggest Panamax bulker pool. Both announcements are heavy on analytics, digitalization and other buzzwords.”
