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Shipping is a profitable business that loses money through many little holes.” It’s one of the best lines Splash Extra has heard about our industry all month and comes courtesy of Mike Konstantinidis, the CEO of Greece’s METIS Cyberspace Technology, a company focusing on machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) for the shipping industry. Konstantinidis co-founded METIS back in 2016. It’s been hard work ever since, but he’s been making headway with forward thinking names in the shipping industry and Konstantinidis firmly believes shipping is now ripe for transformation. “Major revolutionary disruptions are coming to an old fashioned, old school business. The transformation is right now,” he says on a Teams call. This is largely down to the way that shipping’s decision making process is changing, disrupting the industry, Konstantinidis believes. “Until now everything was empirical, rules of thumb as all that data was indecipherable,” Konstantinidis explains, saying that this is now changing thanks to AI and machine learning. By way of an example, Konstantinidis asks Splash Extra to imagine we’re managing a fleet and we have two ships in the Singapore area and a charter party agreement to handle. The fourth revolution in shipping is happening - some will not survive “Which ship will be more profitable for you? It’s an extremely complex decision with weather, the shape of the ship, routing, speeds, fuels, etc, all to be factored in,” he says, something his company has answers for any owner willing to trial his technology. This year METIS is doing a lot of work to connect the machinery installed on vessels to provide owners with greater insight into every facet of operations. The data analytics specialist has also been working on the scenarios side of the business to aid decision making. “Our customers cannot imagine how this will change their jobs with all the what if scenarios we are working via machine learning to understand how vessels will work in their next voyages,” Konstantinidis claims. As another example of what METIS can deliver, Konstantinidis relates a recent job carried out for an owner where METIS went through an entire fleet to work out which ships were economically sound with upcoming regulations such as EEXI and EEDI on the horizon. The two vessels METIS identified as unlikely to make the cut when new potential regulations come into play in the coming years were swiftly sold by the owner. This serves as another example of the forward thinking clients Konstantinidis likes to deal with. It also sparked a whole new business plank for METIS, which can be exclusively revealed by Splash Extra today. Predictive emissions index Tomorrow sees the launch of METIS’s predictive Poseidon Principles emission index. The company has refined its cloud-based data acquisition and ship performance reporting solution to offer shipping’s first tool to predict the trade-off between emissions reduction and debt servicing for ships financed under the Poseidon Principles, a framework established in 2019 by leading banks to assess and disclose the climate alignment of ship finance portfolios. METIS claims the new index is the first viable methodology allowing owners to predict whether their ships would benefit most from investment, a change in operating profile or disposal in response to advancing emissions rules. The unique METIS index could help owners outperforming their Poseidon Principles-stipulated annual efficiency ratio (grams of CO2 per dwt-mile) seek to lower borrowing costs, while other owners facing a suboptimal annual efficiency ratio can use the index to identify the impact of different shortcomings on ship performance. Up next, METIS plans to use its scenario-based analysis to predict the impact of individual technology upgrades. “The fourth revolution in shipping is happening - some will not survive,” Konstantinidis says, suggesting that shipping’s actual business model is being highly disrupted right now. Environmental conscientiousness has to be factored increasingly into shipping’s decision making process, something that Konstantinidis believes is the same side of the optimisation coin in many ways. Summing up shipping’s blind inefficiency and METIS’s determination to smooth the industry’s operations and decision making process, Konstantinidis quips: “Shipping is like a barrel, with a little, little hole at the bottom.” The word Metis relates to an Ancient Greek goddess, and translates roughly as wisdom and cunning.

The trade-off between emissions reduction and debt servicing

How machine learning and artificial intelligence are revolutionising every facet of shipping

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