Hong Kong : Matthew Flynn is one of the best known names among shipbuilding analysts, widely quoted across the media and a contributor to our sister title SinoShip magazine.
After a decade-long career in the media where he became one of shipping’s top journalists based in Tokyo and Hong Kong he set out on as his own as a consultant in late 2002.
Today, he has many different hats including managing director and founding partner of the online shipbuilding database Worldyards. The Singapore-headquartered shipbuilding database now tracks some 257 yards in 27 countries and plenty more besides. Having started out tracking merchant shipbuilding, latterly Worldyards has spread its wings into the hot offshore sector. Worldyards Offshore has been subscribed by oil majors and offshore companies.
Another domain where there is substantial business for Worldyards is in audits for offshore fabrication projects or complex commercial shipbuilding.
“We specifically have an ongoing call for audits that investigate project management and production management execution capability and risk analysis,” Flynn says, adding: “We have a broad based set of clients across geographies and industries.”
On the current plight faced by shipbuilders Flynn does not mince his words, saying there is “dramatic overcapacity”. It is this excess of yards, argues Flynn, that is actually spurring ship innovation and the eco ship era.
“The yards are hungry so they are pulling out the stops to build ships that are efficient rather than playing the game of efficient shipbuilding,” he explains, before adding one his characteristic memorable shipping quips: “More ship for the buck rather than building more ships.”
Flynn is well versed in smart one liners to sum up people or aspects of the industry, a particular favourite of Maritime CEO being one from a decade ago on the larger-than-life president of Hong Kong’s Wah Kwong, George Chao: “He has the swagger of a riverboat gambler.”
Flynn’s contributions to our sister site SinoShip News are always prescient. For example, right at the end of last year, he noted: “For the punters at today's race track, shipping is simply not seen as the good horse to back. This should create some decent purchase opportunities.”
Similarly at the end of January this year, when asked to comment on the tough times facing Chinese shipbuilders, the fluent Mandarin speaking US native observed: “This year will distinguish the committed tougher-than-steel-itself players from the tourists who were expecting that shipbuilding was going to be a sunny paradise.”
Flynn is also the author of a couple of books. First was a prophetic volume from 2003, China Shipbuilding: The Emerging Giant, a 188-page hardback published with Poten & Partners. Last year he was behind a coffee table book, Water Margin: Hong Kong’s Link to the Sea, which focused on the troubled environmental state of the waters surrounding the Special Administrative Region. [03/06/13]
