Delivering a keynote speech under the topic of “Singapore – A Global Enabler for Maritime Trade”, PSA International’s Group CEO – Tan Chong Meng, described how the company had shifted from a network of ports to networked corridors to offering solutions. He discussed the interdependency of different parties in the supply chain in detail and how reducing emissions will drive this further and how PSA’s role in this.
“We have now restructured our business into two classes, one is ports and one cargo solutions. Within cargo solutions we make use of ports as a fundamental hard resource, we add facilities that we call port adjacencies, we are building customer adjacencies that are much more global than the portfolio of ports that we have and connect that digitally.”
The session ‘Market Outlook: How is the Industry Evolving to Become More Resilient?’ focused heavily on the outlook for the container shipping sector, with port congestion reducing and spot rates falling by 77% from their peak according to Jayendu Krishna, Director Drewry Maritime Advisors. With falling demand Drewry now believes a previous forecast that global container volumes would breach 1bn teu in 2026 may now be missed.
Alan Murphy CEO and Founder of Sea-Intelligence painted two possible scenarios ahead for shipping lines – a managed decline with lay-ups starting now or a rate war. “What I personally think is much more likely is headed into we’re in for a rate war,” he said, putting an 80% chance on a rate war.
