Source: ET Infra
In an exclusive interview to ET Infra, Mark Darley, Chief Operating Officer, Lloyd’s Register, dwelt on what the opening of the new office means for the Company’s growth plans in India and the initiatives taken to meet the digitalisation and decarbonisation goals of the global shipping industry. Excerpts:
What does the opening of a new office in Mumbai indicate?
For Lloyd’s Register, our new office in Mumbai represents a big step in the transformation journey we are making globally in terms of the services that we can provide, how we could provide services to our clients to improve the consistency, reliability and also ease of using LR.
We are very cognisant of the expansion that would come in terms of digitally enabled services whether that’s through our recent acquisition of OneOcean (the digital solutions platform providing actionable intelligence to maritime professionals worldwide) or whether that’s through digitally enabling our compliance business/class business. It’s not only about today but also about laying the foundation for what we can see we will need in the future.
For these reasons, India and Mumbai give us the opportunity to build that at the scale we need to support our global operations.
What is your business size in India? How much of the Indian tonnage do you cover?
Currently, 25 percent by gross tonnage (GT) of the in-service Indian flagged vessels are classed with LR. This is more than any other non-Indian classification society.
For many years, we have been supporting the Indian shipbuilding industry and the ship recycling industry across both governmental projects as well as private projects. We are working with 5-6 shipyards in India, building a variety of vessels both for domestic orders as well as for exports.
A third of your class services are now done remotely. What role does your India operations play in this?
A third of our class services are delivered through remote survey capability. We all know shipping is a 24/7 business, as we also know ships move around the world. So, it’s about deciding how much of the world I can cover based on traffic and availability.
If you look at the word map, India is in the middle and can cover a large proportion of where ships are going and the survey request that we get. We already have a digital survey centre in America. The Indian digital survey centre will work hand in hand with the American centre to make sure that we can cover time zones without asking colleagues to work two shifts round the clock in India. The Indian digital survey centre is by far the biggest and would deliver most of those remote surveys.
It’s interesting to see that remote surveys are catching up…
The technology exists. Coming out of the pandemic, we developed the technology and developed our own app to enable us to link up with the ship remotely and do things over video streaming or by asking the ship to send us data, which are linked directly to the ship to credit the survey items that traditionally would have required us to go onto the ship wherever it is in the world.
With the advent of things like Starlink (a satellite internet constellation) and the significance of acceleration of how much data ships can stream ashore and then what you can do with that data looking forward, we then effectively want to take the data from the ship and then use algorithms to either credit some of the items or inform either the remote survey centre or inform the colleagues going on board the ship.
We will still be sending physical surveyors on board the ships, but when they are going on board the ships, they are going with much more information and understanding than what they have today.
Are you doing any work with any Indian agency on decarbonisation of the shipping industry?
We are collaborating with the Directorate General of Shipping. We have a team that deals with advisory services, and they have already written a report for DG Shipping on what needs to be done because decarbonisation is a vast area and there are lot of aspirations from different people.
The DG Shipping is also creating a centre of excellence for southwest Asia on how we can support not just India but also southwest Asia. We are part of that.
How do you view India’s regulatory landscape for shipping? Is there room for improvement?
We have been in India for 150 years; we have strong relations with the Indian flag (ships) and DG Shipping.
We collaborate through the International Association of Classification Societies (IACS) with the Indian Register of Shipping (IRS).
In the last two years, IACS has created a decarbonisation and a digitalisation panel and through that as members within IACS, there are certain areas where we do need to collaborate because in decarbonisation and digitalisation, we don’t want to go off in separate directions. All of us are there to support the transition and support the industry. The decarbonisation targets set in 2018 and refreshed last year need scalability and therefore we need a certain degree of harmonisation of regulations and standards.
On digitalisation, for example, there are no common standards yet and this is what we are working on in terms of what the data looks like from a ship, how you use the data, what form the data needs to be and that’s something we discuss through IACS with the IRS.
We work with over 160 flags at Lloyd’s Register and there are flags that are proactive, there are flags that are reactive and there are flags that may be a bit passive.
When we are developing solutions, particularly in the decarbonisation stage, it is important that the flags are there from day one. A lot of these developments that we see in the last three years, whether it is the first ammonia fuelled ship or the first hydrogen fuelled ship or how we can bring nuclear power into shipping, class societies can’t solve that on their own. From day one you need to have the ship owners, the shipyards, the fuel supplier, the engine manufacturer, the class society and also the flag because ultimately one of the barriers that could exist otherwise is that the work is done in isolation and then when we are trying to bring some of this new technology, new capability in, we then have another hurdle.
Traditionally, in maritime, all the regulations have pretty much been prescriptive and reactive.
In decarbonisation, the rules are shifting to proactive and goal-based regulations. To do that requires a different type of thinking from a design and regulation perspective, you have to think about the outcome, then you have to think about all the potential risks and hazards that could exist and then you work through mitigating those risks so that you can be assured to a certain degree by prescriptive regulations. So, it requires a different capability, and it is more intensive.
That’s why it’s great that we’ve been able to and continue to find talent like what we found in India because that requires a different type of thinking.
What are your growth plans for India?
We have 200 people in India that includes OneOcean.
There are several people who will be onboarded in the next few months. The areas that we are expanding here include technical support officers who traditionally used to be called plan approval officers. Now they are plan approval officers plus because they are doing a lot of things which are not prescriptive, they are going into digitalisation using newer technologies. Technical support office is one area where we are investing heavily. The digital survey centre in Chennai is also another area where we are expanding.
We are also looking at advisory services. One of the things we have realised is that the clients want to see certain kinds of things and two things that came out very strongly were about consistency and responsiveness. Having a large workforce here dealing with different things and still remaining consistent is something that we are going to focus on in this office.
A new state of art thing that we are also building is the ship emergency response centre. Globally, so far, LR was covering this service for our clients only from Southampton in the UK.
There is a second centre that is getting created in Mumbai. From this centre, we will be able to help our clients in terms of their emergencies, and exercises that they need to prepare for, like a fire drill, in case of a fire.
In the last one year, we have grown more than double, from 75 to 200 and I am anticipating that to go further by at least one and half times, to around 350.
The ship survey business is highly male dominated. What are your plans on diversity and inclusiveness in surveys?
We have a D&I strategy for 3.5 years. It’s not just diversity and inclusion in terms of male-female ratios, we are also cognisant within the industry and within LR of age, gender and demographics. We are around 10 percent if you look across the whole industry. When we are recruiting people here in Mumbai, one of the criteria is to increase our gender diversity. We have already got female surveyors in places like Goa, delivering new construction surveys.
To break the glass ceiling, you’ve also got to work at the grass roots level because if you look at where Lloyd’s Register gets a lot of its capability from, it’s either people coming ashore (after sailing on board ships) or its grass roots university level. We have got to purposely target to break the glass ceiling.
Currently, there are challenges with safety issues. Within LR, we are trying to address those. Seeing Pooja Chathoth, our surveyor in Goa (currently the only female surveyor who is working on vessels in India), there are interests that are getting generated. It is also a fact that they are facing challenges from their families on safety concerns. With a role model (Pooja Chathoth), we are trying to influence others, saying that it is safe, LR is with you, that’s the assurance. We are also working with the Indian Maritime University and other universities like the Cochin University on this. We are trying to change the mind set.
