If someone speaks of Asia today, most people refer to China, or less probably, India. The world follows the developments in awe and fascination and if all projections come true the 21st century will be a ‘ChinIndia’ one, challenging the Euro-American pre-dominance economically and politically.
No wonder this has significant impacts on shipping activity in the region and the shipping industry structure as a whole. We can observe three key drivers that take effect on the industry structure and that may be considered as mega trends. First is the increase in shipping demand due to the global industrial restructuring as service industries are booming in developed countries, but their traditional manufacturing industries are moving overseas. Second-off this can be seen in the sharp increase of the Asian shipping industry which is determined by the huge
demand of the Asian industry with regards to crude oil, grain, coal, and iron ore. This again drives growth in the shipbuilding industry and other shipping related services.
Third and last, we may call it the ‘China-factor’ as Capt.
Wei Jiafu (CEO of COSCO Group) put it quite adequately and simple: China plays the role of a driving engine with its high economic growth rates, with its hunger for raw materials and resources that are needed to fuel the biggest manufacturing plant in the world.
Over the years BBC Chartering positioned itself in the region with a network of offices in Mumbai, Singapore, Seoul, Shanghai, and Tokyo. As a full service hub, BBC Singapore provides vessel chartering and operations, technical planning and load/discharge execution services to all Asian regional offices, including Australia and continues to see many opportunities.
It was this April that Lars Schoennemann, formerly Executive Chartering Officer in the Leer headquarters, Germany, transferred to Singapore in order to head our Asian activities. Now appointed Managing Director of BBC Chartering Singapore, we took this opportunity to learn about his mission, tasks and motives that help him do his job:
Excellence: BBC has reorganized its Chartering & Business Development set-up. Your area of responsibility primarily involves the further development of the Asian business. What would you describe as your three most important tasks?
First is to support activities that increase our relevance in the market. The Asian market is very dynamic. We see a lot of changes in our client base and it is our challenge to stay on top of these changes and the changing client demands. One ongoing core task is to identify our client groups and their needs so we can work on creating and offering relevant services for them.
Second one is to increase the awareness of the BBC Chartering brand in the market. With a booming Asian industry there is a lot of competition in the region. It seems sometimes difficult for our customers to find a shipping partner which they trust and rely on. Combined with the dynamic market behavior, it is our continuous job to increase the brand awareness for BBC Chartering in the region so we will be recognized as leading heavy-lift carrier.
Thirdly, only if our clients are aware of us and our relevance to their businesses we will be able to build up the relationships that form the basis for trust and loyalty in our brand. This is at least as we want to see this with our cultural imprint. However, we should strengthen our ability to learn and build up our capabilities to understand local cultures and habits better which may also shed a different light on many things.
Excellence: The Asian market was hit hard by the latest global recession. Compared to our other business zones Europe, North and South Americas, how would you compare economic vitality and the market potential in the next 1-3 years?
There is no question that Asia, especially with China as driving engine, is not just a mayfly. It is obvious that Asian economies clearly follow the goal to increase global competition in any respect.
The last recession may have taken its toll on some areas of trade, but recovery is highly visible.
As shipping company we can observe for many industries a sustainable trend of foreign companies placing orders to manufacture larger industry components in the region. This also leads to increasing demand for heavy lift shipping capacity. Looking at current Asian order-books, we can see that manufacturing output will show strong increases for project cargoes in the near future.
We feel confident that this will positively impact demand and rates for our ships in about six to twelve months from now, and I am sure we can make successful use of these opportunities. Meanwhile, we have to face some stiff local competition with comparably cheap tonnage from China and Korea.
Excellence: Where do you see the ‘hottest opportunities’ for BBC Chartering in your market? Where do you see the ‘biggest challenges’?
Our strong points clearly lay in our fleet size and the present network of local offices.
This gives our clients both the advantage of tonnage availability, and the mutual flexibility to adequately respond to market demands in a regional context and on a personal level. We may use these points as assets and turn them into opportunities as we continue to face our challenges.
As mentioned before such challenges lay in building up the relevance, awareness and loyalty of our clients towards our BBC Chartering network and the services we provide. It is our declared goal to stay in this game for the long term and become the partner of choice to our clients. By defining, structuring and executing effective sales activities we can capitalize on our strong points and tackle our challenges, which will eventually get us closer to our goal of becoming the number one supplier of heavy-lift tonnage also in this market.
Another constant challenge is given through cross cultural interactions as everyone is challenged in overcoming his personal and cultural imprints. Nevertheless, all of us have to be aware of this in our networking activities while we should bear our professional values and ethical standards in mind. In this respect I would also like to remark that we can only be successful if we maintain a productive and constructive work attitude, just as it is paramount to be aware of our joint mission. Especially with China, Japan, and Korea being rather young BBC offices, everyone is charged to integrate and support our greater objectives.
Excellence: Which customer segments, which industries will be in your focus?
We are clearly looking at the classical segments of the oil & gas industry, energy & utility industry, heavy construction industry, and the petrochemical and processing industry from a perspective as heavy-lift and project logistic partner.
As competition does not stop at a certain doorstep either, we have to talk to clients directly, to local brokers, and international project and freight forwarders. We have to see individually how we can become their partner of choice while we focus on strengthening and building relationships that matter.
Excellence: Let’s assume we have this conversation in five years time and we ask this question: What would be the developments you were especially proud of having taken effect on in the past five years in your professional life?
Lars Schoennemann: Looking back I will be proud on the fact that we created a structured approach to better plan and execute our chartering business and that I can see that this is applied as a base standard in BBC offices, not only in Asia, but all over the BBC world. I would be happy to see that my expectations towards such an approach have been met because we were able to prove that our workflows became more efficient and our delivered services were valued higher by our customers.
I will be proud and happy looking back, seeing that our goal materialized that we were able to maintain or conquer the number one position, both in the market as project carrier, and as preferred partner of choice to our clients.
At last, I will be happy to see that we were able to build and maintain a corporate culture amongst all offices that empowers us to constructively develop and adapt to changing and challenging conditions.