In January 2011 there were 11,092 tankers in the world merchant fleet (Note 1) and 1,350 tank barges operating in European Inland Waterways (Note 2) but how many voyages do they make each year?
That was the question Hub Software Engineering www.hubse.com was trying to answer a month or so back when we were updating our business plan. HubSE’s flagship product Claims Management Service (CMS) handles all aspects of demurrage and other claims from the calculation through to settlement. Clients of CMS do not pay any onboarding fees or maintenance costs, instead HubSE operate CMS under the Software as a Service (SAAS) model where clients pay according to how many claims they process through the system.
We actually wanted to know how many demurrage claims there are likely to be in the world every year, which is nigh on impossible to establish, so we thought we’d find out how many voyages are performed then guess from there how many voyages incur demurrage. The next step would be to guess how many demurrage claims have oil trading claims behind them reflecting the buying and selling of oil amongst the trading companies.
We stumbled at the first hurdle. No-one could tell us definitively how many voyages are performed. I contacted a few shipbrokers and one leading broker reported 17,000 fixtures last year, but of course many fixtures are unreported and what about voyage performed under Contracts of Affreightment (COA)? One broker did suggest contacting Lloyd’s List Intelligence. This was more promising as they told me that they monitored some 25,000 crude voyages each year (Note 3). Apparently tracking the products market is much more difficult in this detail. I’m sure many traders would not want the world to know where and when they were shipping cargoes but I am surprised this information is not more readily available.
In the European barge market I don’t know where to start! As a guess we could say that each barge on average performs a voyage every three days giving about 164,000 voyages per year. How does this sound to you?
What about other sectors of this business e.g. LPG and Chemicals?
Have you got any interesting statistics for this business or know where to get them from? Have you carried out any similar exercises and have the answers to these questions? Please share them here by using the Leave a Comment button.
Note 1. UNCTAD Review of Maritime Transport 2011
Note 2. Odin Barging 2012
Note 3. Lloyd’s List Intelligence