Strategies in ‘Shipping Business Management’

The paper deals with the tactics and strategies applied by shipping companies. During current depression in the dry cargo sector, shipowners adopted two tactics: to ‘survive’ and ‘look after opportunities.’ Shipowners are mostly reactive-managers and apply Porter’s strategy of ‘cost leadership’ mainly through economies of scale, cutting-down fleet’s average age as well total costs. This has been applied in 1986 and in 2016. The poverty of research about shipping strategic issues, given also that nowadays all management functions became strategic, is worth noting. Lately (2013) maritime economists showed an interest in strategies. This we believe is due to the fact that many maritime companies are now listed and data are now available. The need of shipowners to find funds for the larger and more expensive ships, led them to ‘stock exchanges.’ This led into the creation of two separate classes of shipping companies: those that remain outside the stock exchanges, which we call them ‘traditional’ and the ‘modern’ ––those inside. Certain economists argued that there is an antagonism between the two classes and that the strategies of the second are unquestionably superior and more profitable than the first’s…Is this true? We do not blame shipowners for having a limited number of strategies, (excluding liners), as ‘Academia left them helpless’; despite GARCHian, neural networking and chaotic models, no forecasting at firm’s level is used or trusted so far. Shipowners feel that a shipping crisis is coming, but they do not know when and for how long it will last…