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An influential name in Asian shipowning circles has blasted shipyards for their lack of innovation, and their failure to offer decarbonisation solutions. Speaking at this week’s Maritime CEO Forum in Singapore, Wellington Koo, executive director of privately held Valles Steamship and chairman of the Hong Kong Shipowners Association, told delegates: “I am not too concerned about newbuild prices. The bigger problem is the new designs I get from the yards are not so new, just downgraded engines to comply with regulations. I am frustrated with the yards for not offering better, newer designs.” Speaking at the same event, Olivia Lennox-King, chief operating officer at Cetus Maritime, one of the largest privately held handysize operators in the world, also expressed her frustration at the yards’ inability to provide solutions for future ships. “They don’t have the solutions to offer for handysize ships, they don’t have the solutions to install on these smaller ships,” Lennox-King said at the exclusive shipowner gathering held at Singapore’s iconic Fullerton Hotel. Commenting on the owners’ dissatisfaction, Andrew Craig-Bennett, Splash’s lead columnist, said it was a result of the dramatic downscaling seen in the shipyard sector since the global financial crisis 15 years ago. “The yards cannot innovate. They have been optimised to the point where they have no talent with the time to think,” Craig-Bennett said. Nick Chubb, who runs UK-based maritime innovation consultancy Thetius, suggested the real problem was owners being unwilling to pay for innovation. “If you want to change behaviour you need to change incentives,” Chubb told Splash Extra. “The business model for most yards is to produce the cheapest possible vessel. The easiest way to achieve that is by building the same ship over and over again with as little change as possible. They have been incentivised to do this for decades. If owners want the yards to become the industry’s great innovators, they will need to be paid to do it, and handsomely.” Dr Martin Stopford, the world’s most famous maritime economist, maintained there was no point blaming the yards. “Everyone’s in the same boat with too many flaky options,” said Stopford, the author of Maritime Economics, adding: “Only the owners really know what will work but it’s the classic problem. In a time of change you ask your customers ‘what do you want?’ and they just say ‘what have you got?’” Stopford said there were no quick fixes on shipping’s path towards decarbonisation. “It’s a major rethink of ship systems and it’s going to be expensive with no guarantee you get your money back,” he warned. KD Adamson, a maritime futurist, argued owners could not have it both ways. On the one hand, she said, owners claim there’s no way they’re going to order ships until they have a level of certainty on where the decarbonisation tech is going. On the other, they blame the yards for failing to deliver them a solution. “The reality is that market-led innovation is fundamentally unsuited to addressing systemic problems like decarbonisation, because incentives and margins are misaligned,” Adamson said. Adamson claimed savvy shipowners have already recognised that the answer lies in convening and reinventing the whole value chain with net zero as a target outcome, creating shared value across their stakeholders and de-risking their investment at the same time.

Yards blasted for failure to offer green solutions

Who's to blame for shipping’s slow innovation towards decarbonisation?

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