The ghosts of shipowners past would recognise 2025

EVERYBODY in attendance at the launch of the International Chamber of Shipping’s predecessor 104 years ago will now be a long time dead.

But were there an afterlife and they were somehow able to watch the proceedings of the trade association’s summit in Athens this week, they may have allowed themselves a knowing nod at the deliberations of their current counterparts.

The 14 delegations from national shipowner associations who came together in London in 1921 had only shortly before that date been busily engaged in trying to sink each other’s merchant tonnage. The First World War was famously described by HG Wells in a Times editorial as “the war that will end war”.

Spoiler alert: it wasn’t. Armed conflict has proliferated ever since, and an ICS survey published to coincide with the conference revealed that political instability is perceived as shipping’s biggest risk.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has disrupted trade in the Black Sea, a significant regional submarket, while the fallout from the Gaza conflict has left Red Sea transits 60% down on 2023.

These words are being written as shipowners digest the news that Israel has hit multiple nuclear programme facilities and other targets in Iran, and what happens next is anyone’s guess. But some brokers have already weighed in with projections of the possible impacts, as is their job.

True, the attacks might just represent a small net positive for tanker tonne-mile demand. But that is scant offset for a development that will be net negative for human beings in the Middle East and beyond.

Another commonality is regulatory pressure. In April 1912, Titanic sank; in January 1914, the first iteration of the Safety of Life at Sea Convention was adopted.

That’s right. We got from a major casualty to international agreement on how to avert recurrence in a mere 20 months. But this is before we had the International Maritime Organization to streamline such discussions.

Solas is still updated from time to time. But nowadays, the hurdles that governments demand shipowners jump over are more likely to be based on environmental considerations.

One of ICS’s most important functions, of course, is to represent the shipowner interest at the IMO. The vibe will be familiar to the ghosts of shipowners past.

Finally, there was the issue of protectionism in developed economies, the merits of which have always been dubious. UK Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin asked the electorate for a mandate to introduce widespread tariffs in 1923; the result was Britain’s first Labour government the following year.

In that era, the economic policy of Britain and its empire actually mattered, with sterling still the dominant currency in shipping and trade more broadly. The nearest parallel today is the US, which has taken its own recent protectionist turn.

Fascinatingly, many of these themes were echoed by ICS chair Emanuele Grimaldi in his speech to the Athens summit. Shipowners are finding that the world around the industry is shifting in profound and sometimes disconcerting ways, he told his audience.

“Geopolitical upheaval, be it through armed conflict, strategic competition, or growing regulatory divergence, is no longer a distant backdrop,” he said. It wasn’t a distant backdrop in 1921, either.

Grimaldi went on to castigate unilateral trade barriers erected by governments around the world, arguing they threaten the ability of shipping to deliver goods and the ability of nations to grow and prosper.

He did not single out any government by name. But the intended target cannot be in reasonable doubt.

Finally, he turned to the IMO’s Marine Environment Protection Committee, which carried a new greenhouse gas emissions strategy in April, describing it as a pivotal moment.

“While it did not give us everything we hoped for, the decisions taken represent progress, and now we must turn that progress into practical action,” he said. That’s the kind of pragmatic attitudes owners presumably once felt towards Solas.

Grimaldi’s speech was also notable as a rallying cry for a coordinated industry response, avoiding the obvious pitfalls of fragmentation by industry segment or by region. That makes sound sense.

Somebody really should come up with a mechanism that groups together shipowner trade associations from the main maritime nations in talking shop mode. Why on earth hasn’t anybody come up with that idea before?