Ship owners and shipping executives in general are often facing challenging decisions, when it comes to vessel employment and strategic planning of their fleet. As such any useful information is in fact added value. To this extent, ship valuations experts VesselsValue just launched a new online product, called VV Trade, which analyzes global trading patterns, starting at the individual vessel level, by using VV’s Deep Sea AIS mapping service to create real time analysis on the speeds, amount of time spent at laden or ballast and even the total Ton Mile Demand of specific fleets or companies. “For example, you can log on to see the slow steaming policy employed by John Fredriksen, how many vessels John Angelicoussis has ballast or laden on any particular day, and to see the % change each quarter for how many Ton Miles are moved on any particular route for the capesize fleet”, say VV experts.
Hellenic Shipping News (www.hellenicshippingnews.com) interviewed VV’s Chief Operating Officer, Mr. Adrian Economakis on this innovative service and what it aims to provide to the shipping industry.
VesselsValue launched this week a new service called VV Trade. Can you let us know what it’s about and how the idea came by to develop such a tool?
In order to aid business decisions on a commercial and operational level, VesselsValue has launched VV Trade: an easy to use, online tool to analyse global trading patterns, starting at the individual vessel level.
For each specific vessel, VV Trade allows clients to clearly see:
- Activity: number of days spent laden or ballast
- Speeds: the average speed when laden or ballast
- Journeys: the specific journeys and dates made by the vessel
- Stoppages: a comprehensive list of all stoppages including dates, type (bunkering, lay up, dry dock etc.) and locations
- Ton Mile Demand for individual vessels: The actual tons carried over the specific number of miles each vessel has travelled during a time frame.
Image 1: example of Activity for 7-9 year old Greek owned Capesize vessels
By combining this data with VV+, VesselsValue’s fleet database and search function, clients can run the above analysis for company fleets, pools or for entire ship types, as well as monitor all activities and journeys at each port.
Taking this one step further, VV Trade also allows users to focus Ton Miles Demand on a global level: VV’s Ton Mile Demand Summary provides an overview by sector (bulkers and tankers) of demand in billions of DWT nautical miles (bn DWT NM) on a weekly, monthly, quarterly or yearly basis. As these huge bn DWT NM figures are quite hard to grasp, the summary can be switched to % change quarter-on-quarter and % year-to-date and so on. VV Trade also provides a linear projection based on the quarter to date.
Image 2: Ton Mile Summary for Capesize vessels
VV was driven to develop the product from demand from the financial and shipowning sectors.
How ground breaking do you think this is in terms of the benefits it offers to interested parties?
VesselsValue is providing an unpresidented level of transparency into the tanker and bulker trades. Understanding the underlying demand trends for different vessels types is a fundamental question for investors, lenders and owners. Also, at the operations level, companies need intelligence on evolution of trades routes, what their competitors or peers are doing and also metrics on their own, rival and benchmark fleet performance. VV Trade gives them real-time and historical information and analytics to allow them to answer these questions
Which are your targeted clients?
Everybody in the shipping industry will be interested in this data as it opens up all vessel activities to everyone. In real time, you can now monitor supply and demand based on actual voyages.
How is this data compiled?
Each day VesselsValue receives 1.5GB of AIS data in a continual stream from satellites. The signal is cleaned up by the ten-strong AIS team in the research office on the Isle of Wight. The development office based in Stoke then run the data through logic engines that further examine and convert the data into vessel voyage information. On a daily basis, the database behind VV TRADE handles over 100 Gigabytes of data on tanker and bulker journeys which can be displayed for single vessels or aggregated at the company, country or sector level. Downloads in Excel are availble as well as auto generated emails to the user which can be ‘called’ at anytime, even if you’re logged into the actual application.
How accurate and up to date is it?
As the data is compiled daily, clients can check the average speeds of vessels travelling specific routes as recently as yesterday.
Traditionally Ton Mile Demand is calculated through customs quarterly export and import data provided months after the quarter has ended, and focuses on the total tonnage of the global fleet.
VesselsValue’s Ton Mile Demand is based on a unique algorithm that works out if a bulker or tanker is laden. It then uses real time AIS data to calculate the exact nautical miles the laden vessels have travelled. From this VV can then calculate the total number of laden ton miles for the global fleet, to provide real time figures for Ton Mile Demand.
What’s the cost for interested clients?
VV only charges clients for what they are interested in using. Therefore existing clients can add on the parts of VV Trade which most interests them for as little as £3,000 per year.
Which are the main trends you’re witnessing through the analysis of this data?
At the end of last year (2016), various brokers’ reports remarked on the surge in Capesize demand in October and November. The graphic below shows the monthly ton mile demand (as a % of the year) for Capesize vessels between Brazil and China. As the graphic reveals, Capesize demand between Brazil and China is distinctly seasonal, with a surge in trade in the autumn, followed by a fall in demand shortly before the Chinese New Year (February / March).
Nikos Roussanoglou, Hellenic Shipping News Worldwide