Shippers profit as carriers suffer amid the crisis

THE theme of this year's Singapore Maritime Week (SMW) is "Positioning for Future Growth". Organiser, the Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore (MPA) says, "In the face of the current challenging market outlook, SMW 2016 seeks to provide a platform for industry professionals to forge new partnerships and discover new opportunities amidst the global economic downturn, evolving regulatory environments and overcapacity in the shipping sector."

That description of a challenging market outlook and overcapacity is especially true of container shipping, and no doubt the reasons for that will be keenly debated next week.

It is unlikely, however, that anybody will approach the issues of the container trades in the same way as a new paper from the benchmarking and market intelligence platform for containerised ocean freight Xeneta. That is to say from the shippers' rather than the shipowners' point of view. (To avoid confusion, the general usage outside the US is that the word "shipper" means the cargo owner, as opposed to the shipowner.)