London: Eleven months ago the founder and ceo of maritime e-commerce site ShipServ, Paul Ostergaard described VesselsValue.com, the company profiled in today’s Maritime CEO interview as having “changed forever the way ships are valued”. It is a fact that VesselsValue.com has changed the shipbroking and ship investment landscape and, says ceo Richard Rivlin, there’s plenty more to come from this British firm.
“A huge gap in the market was created for VesselsValue.com when ship values fell significantly in the crash,” Rivlin explains, adding: “People were desperate to know the constantly changing values, needing a software system that would daily and automatically update values for all ships within the traditional shipping segments.”
VesselsValue.com provides instant, accurate values and its algorithms are based on a large variety of data, such as features of the vessel, activity in the market and S&P data.
Next on the horizon are offshore valuations. Also the company is making more developments on the recently launched VV@ AIS vessel tracking module, which integrates full vessel tracking with its valuation service VV$.
The online firm is also introducing a Fleet At Risk map, which allows the user to split the world fleet into maritime regions, analysing global insurance risk.
A regular question we pose on this site is whether shipping has been slow to embrace the internet into how it goes about its daily operations. Rivlin reckons this particular tide has turned.
“Increasingly more and more maritime information sources are going online, and of course some are going online only,” he notes, adding: “Inevitably, there will always be many old boys in shipping who will prefer hardcopy, and more traditional methods to obtain data. However, considering the vast influx of new clients, having access to instant values online at the click of a button seems a clear fit in a rapidly changing industry such as shipping.”
For example, 26% of VesselsValue.com’s subscribers open the data and newsletters via a mobile device, highlighting the importance of up to the moment, instant online values. Shipping is clearly embracing the internet era. [14/01/14]
