An owner buying conventional tonnage today is financing a twenty to twenty-five year asset on debt that runs five to seven years. Two electricity transitions that have largely finished suggest value starts moving long before that debt matures, and that the credit assessment arrives later still.
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Tonnage transits through the Suez Canal were running about 70 percent below the 2023 average as of early May 2025, with traffic still routing around the Cape of Good Hope. The additional distance has absorbed surplus capacity while newbuilding deliveries continued, and the effect is clearest in c...
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An owner sizing a dual-fuel newbuilding or a major efficiency retrofit is working against a published calendar: the IMO commitment to net-zero by or around 2050, the EU trading scheme, the carbon intensity rules already in force. The people who would lend against that vessel are ranking a differe...
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Economic sanctions are usually measured in goods: exports blocked, cargoes seized, customs flows redirected. A maritime service economy feels them somewhere else. Freight earnings arrive through the services account of the balance of payments, as transport receipts, and those receipts can move wi...
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Dry bulk shipping moves in long cycles of earnings, investment, and returns. A central question for any buyer is whether the level of industry-wide ordering carries information about the return on a vessel acquired today. Four decades of market data indicate that it does, and that the direction r...
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Ship finance has contracted sharply over the past decade. The combined shipping portfolio of the top forty global lending banks fell from about USD 455 billion at the end of 2011 to roughly USD 284 billion at the end of 2023, a decline of close to 38 percent, while the world fleet kept growing. T...
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A second-hand bulker’s price is set by several forces at once: the newbuilding market, freight earnings, the cost of financing, and periodic market shocks. The less obvious question is how these forces rank against one another, and how long each one persists. That ordering separates an acquisitio...
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A newbuilding order commits significant capital over a multi-year horizon, and the economics a vessel will carry for the next two to three decades are largely fixed before it earns any freight. Its fuel consumption, speed, cargo capacity and the integrity of its structure and machinery are determ...
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