Hong Kong: Hong Kong-founded Ocean Insights is trying to position itself as an invaluable tool for shippers, providing sailing schedules including details of slot sharing agreements, track and trace capabilities and much vaunted on-time performance data.
Launched by Konstantin Borek in the past year, what sets it apart from most of its competitors is that Ocean Insights makes slot-sharing agreements visible within its sailing schedule search engine.
“Even though carriers are using the same vessel, these respective shipping lines often publish different rates, arrival times and further discrepancies,” Borek says of the difficulties shippers face when confronted with slot sharing ships.
The sailing schedule system covers in the global market 98,000 unique port pairs and 37 shipping lines.
In September 2009 Borek started his education at Hellmann Worldwide Logistics, where he studied transport and logistics management together with the GSIS Business College in Hong Kong. One day at Hellmann, he had the challenge to find more information about all shipping lines to analyze the market to make analytical and strategic decisions to find out which of the carriers were the most accountable ones.
Working on this project Borek found out that the market to compare shipping lines internationally is not at all transparent and there was no system which combines all relevant information like sailing schedules, on-time performance reports, slot sharing agreements and track and trace data. With this knowledge the idea of Ocean Insights was born.
It took 18 months of data trawling from Borek and his team to make this unique online business intelligence site but now he says he has indeed made box shipping “transparent”.
“We want to revolutionize the whole market and we have big visions for future projects,” he tells Maritime CEO.
Up next users of Ocean Insights can expect to see shipping rates published, the new rate system is currently in its beta testing phase. Shippers have rarely had such insight into the liner trades. [25/06/13]
